Living Labs Institute

Schools of Concentration

School for Sensitive Ecologies

We have been working to explore the possibilities creating the connections between the people and their environment. Our work in sensitive ecologies has been about finding the balance between humans and the ecosystem around them.

Our school here grows with an inquiry: How do humans live in relationship with the more-than-human world?

These relationships are not only found in forests or faraway wilderness, they exist in the wetlands, waterscapes, grasslands, and city edges where life unfolds. To nurture these connection, we learn from the ecologies themselves and from the people whose lives remain deeply entangled with them. Sensitive ecologies, for us, are teachers, companions, and co-creators of wellbeing and knowledge.

Here, our school becomes a place to listen closely to such voices, human and more-than-human and to reimagine our ecologies as resources and relationships to be cared for.

Uncultivated plants used in local healing practices to treat wasp bites at Veerbhushan's farm.
From one of our conversations with Veerbhushan, a natural farmer in Bidar. Picking a small stray of grass from the roadside, he asked: "Do you know how powerful this is?” Before I could answer, he continued: “Deer, hare, elephants, some of the most intelligent, strong, agile, and fast animals, survive solely on this. That shows how powerful this tiny bunch is.”

The key questions that guide this school are:

  • 🔎How can we genuinely understand and engage with the unique characteristics, people, and ecosystems of a specific location?
  • 🔎How can learning experiences be designed to be interactive, hands-on, and culturally sensitive?
  • 🔎How can collaborative efforts bring together diverse skills and perspectives from different fields to address complex ecological concerns?
  • 🔎How can traditional notions of development be challenged and reshaped to prioritize ecological well-being, sustainable practices, and respectful coexistence between human and non-human life?
  • 🔎How can field-based insights, hands-on creation, and continuous reflection be used to generate new knowledge?

Courses

Past courses

  • Past

    Whose Land and Whose Development?

    A collective inquiry to understand the nexus the social factors, politics and policies framework behind green energy projects affecting commons & wildlife habitat, shrinking grasslands and Patoralism.

    • Schools For Concentration: Sensitive Ecologies
    • Micro-Context: Solar Farms
    • Micro-Context: Unsustainable Urbanisation
    • +1 More Micro-Context
    • Place: Bidar
    • Trimester: 01
  • Past

    Alternative Glossaries: Water systems in ONEs

    23 – 26 Mar 2026

    Learn to develop a glossary that will communicate the diversity of life, conditions, and uses it holds for both humans and other ecology.

    • Schools For Concentration: Sensitive Ecologies
    • Micro-Context: Water Systems
    • Micro-Context: Restoration And Conservation Of Karez
    • Trimester: 03
  • Past

    Listening to a place

    2 – 5 Dec 2025

    This course will be about listening to a place, recording it and sampling it. Students will engage with different modes of listening — from embodied to contextual listening, i.e., listening and sensing with their bodies to listening as a way to learn about a place, its history and politics.

    • Schools For Concentration: Sensitive Ecologies
    • Place: Bidar
    • Learning Module: Make-a-thon
    • Trimester: 02
  • Past

    Mapping to understand socio-ecological phenomena in the place

    26 Oct – 1 Nov 2025

    This workshop will explore the socioecological system of this transect in with maps as a tool, guide and an artefact that documents observations, and communicates the entangled nature of these systems.

    • Schools For Concentration: Sensitive Ecologies
    • Micro-Context: Ecology In Urban Spaces
    • Micro-Context: Agrarian Practices
    • +11 More Micro-Context
    • Place: Bidar
    • Learning Module: Workshop
    • Trimester: 02

Facilitators