The Sustainable Sandalwood Conference aims to spark discussion about interdisciplinary approaches to conserving sandalwood in South India.
Venue: Infosys Limited, Mysore
Infosys Rd, Hebbal Industrial Estate, Hebbal, Mysuru, Karnataka
Date: 30 April 2025
About the conference
For millennia, sandalwood has played an important role in Indian cultural, religious, and therapeutic practices. Long sought after as a prized perfumery material and fixative, a history of overharvesting and illegal logging has led to a dwindling sandalwood population in its original native range in South India. The disappearance of sandalwood over the past 30 years adds to the urgency of capturing relevant local knowledge about the tree from aging populations, as well as the importance of supporting preservation and renewed cultivation efforts. As a valuable resource, sandalwood cultivation in agroforestry could offer Indian farmers in semi-arid zones an important source of income.
The aim of the conference is to tackle the following questions:
1) What is the current population of sandalwood in South India, and what challenges are faced in conserving and cultivating the tree?
2) How can indigenous knowledge about sandalwood be captured to support broader cultural awareness, decision-making and cultivation practices?
3) How can community involvement support sandalwood conservation and cultivation?
Who should attend?
The sustainable sandalwood conference brings together design researchers, forestry experts, data scientists and archivists to reflect on ways in which we can capture and organize indigenous knowledge about sandalwood in South India and create conditions for community-based conservation and cultivation aimed at supporting the local population of the tree.
Organizers
| Dr Simon Niedenthal Professor of Interaction Design at the School of Arts and Communication (K3), Malmö University. Sweden | Dr Srinath Srinivasa Professor and Dean of Research and Development at the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, India | Dr Shalini R. Urs Executive Director Emerita, International School of Information Management (ISiM), University of Mysore, Mysuru, India |
Agenda
| Time (IST) | Event / Talk | Speaker |
|---|---|---|
| 09:30 | Registration & Coffee | |
| 10:00 | Welcome, Sandalwood and olfactory guardianship | Simon Niedenthal |
| 10:15 | The state of sandalwood: current South Indian populations and conservation strategies | Arun Kumar |
| 10:45 | Traditional Uses Through the Scientific Lens: The Multifaceted Nature of Sandalwood | Dhanushka Hettiarachchi |
| 11:15 | Coffee | |
| 11:30 | Design strategies for capturing indigenous knowledge of precious forestry resources | Lizette Reitsma |
| 12:00 | Shaping an archive of sandalwood knowledge: the perspective from Mysore | Shalini Urs |
| 12:30 | Lunch | |
| 14:00 | AI, Storytelling, and Sandalwood | Srinath Srinavasa |
| 14:30 | Conversations on Sandalwood | |
| 16:00 | Closing Remarks |
Expected Outcomes
- Expand our understanding of the challenges of cultivating and conserving sandalwood trees.
- Begin to shape initial ontologies for a knowledge base about sandalwood.
- Begin to identify local communities in which to conduct fieldwork accessing indigenous knowledge about sandalwood.
