Durable Derangements: The Climate of Mumbai's Coastal Road
5.30pm - 7pm
By
Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development, in partnership with IndOx
Flora Anderson Hall, Somerville College

Graphic Durable Derangements

Speaker: Nikhil Anand, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania

Discussants: Hannah Knox, Professor of Anthropology, UCL

In this talk, Prof Nikhil Anand will examine the making of Mumbai’s Coastal Road Project. How might we account for the production of a highway in a climate changed city, one that it is situated on made-up land that fills an increasingly restive, rising sea? Thinking with Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement (2016), Prof Anand will draw attention to the interests, aesthetics and technologies with which the road and is made durable. He will argue that Mumbai Coastal Road is not made with “rational” plans, designs and studies of urban infrastructure. It is mobilized by the aesthetics of modernity (Ghertner 2015) and particular “habits of thought” (Benedict 1934) that privilege, valorize and assume the possibility of bourgeois regularity in the city; a deeply felt orientation and mode of intervening in the world that continues to produce the climate crisis, both in Mumbai and beyond.

This lecture will be followed by a reception.

For any queries, please contact: oicsd@some.ox.ac.uk.