Aruna Chandrasekhar is an independent media practitioner and commentator. Her interests and work dwell on intersecting themes of corporate accountability, environmental justice, climate change, conflict, culture, gender, geopolitics, health, and human rights. She likes to tell difficult stories differently and thinks a lot about the energy and social transformations necessary to protect frontline communities at risk in a fast-warming, far-right world. These are questions that have taken her from India’s coalfields to UN climate negotiations. As an independent journalist, her stories have appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, The Caravan Magazine, Scroll and many other outlets. Aruna previously worked with Amnesty International as a global climate advisor and as a business and human rights researcher. In June 2019, she curated the exhibition Breathless at Delhi’s Bikaner House in June 2019, based on a nation-wide photojournalistic reporting series she undertook with photojournalist and collaborator Ishan Tankha to document India’s air emergency. Aruna spent the first wave of the pandemic acquiring a master’s degree in environmental change and management from the University of Oxford in 2019. She’s now trying to survive the second one in Mumbai.

Image credits: Courtesy of the contributor