OK, so hi, everyone, very warm, welcome to week four of the modern South Asian studies seminars at the University of Oxford.
My name is Nadia Martin. I'm the director of the Contemporary South Asian Studies Programme here,
and it's my absolute pleasure to be a chairing this incredible of discussion on the
methodological and political challenges of academic research on climate change in South Asia.
Just a quick note on the format for those of you joining us for the first time,
the stone every speaker who talks about 10 to 12 minutes about their own work.
And then you have an open conversation amongst about this.
Please do feel free to pop your questions into the Q&A books as we go along and of course, at the end of the presentations.
Now I'm going to introduce the speakers in the order in which they would be speaking.
It's a bit random order, but that's the way it is and other you're up first.
So, OK, so first we're going to have a doctor who's a presidential fellow in environmental history at the University of Manchester.
His current research examines colonial and post-colonial urban spaces, disease colleges and rapid environmental change.
This research is deeply collaborative, and it involves working with colleagues, including Bhavani.
Rahman was an early colonial historian, Karen Coelho, who is an anthropologist, and Molly Roy,
accountable and is focussed impartially on the coastal city of Chennai, formerly Madras and its many hydro spheres.
Previously, articles worked on large dams, technocratic governance and regimes of property in colonial and post-colonial south India.
After going to have Professor Nosheen unworked, Nosheen is professor of regional and City Planning Department of Social Sciences at IB Karachi,
and she's also the founder and director of the very, very amazing Karachi Urban Lab.
Nosheen also holds a joint appointment as research fellow in the city's cluster and ideas at the University of Sussex in the UK.
And after noticing we could have Dr Camiguin, Devine was an environmental anthropologist focussing on the anthropology of development.
She's currently a postdoctoral fellow of the Department of Social Ontology, University of Oslo,
and is the author of the recently released an open access book Misreading the Bengali Delta Climate Change,
Development and Livelihoods in Coastal Bangladesh. This was published by the University of Washington Press.
After coming minute, we're going to have to talk, Venkatraman,
who is an anthropologist whose research intersects environmental studies, PhDs and visual studies.
Chitra G2's currently working on her book, which is entitled Drawing Coastlines, Climate Anxieties and the Visual Reinvention of Mumbai Shore.
Jeter is particularly interested in experimenting with comics as an Indian graphic medium,
and I should also add that Thrones's lovely Instagram handle, where you can see some of these beautiful comics.
And finally, we're going to have Dr Nicola Unenthused,
an environmental anthropologist whose research focuses on cities, infrastructure, speed, power and climate change.
He addresses these questions by studying the political ecology of cities through the very different lives of water.
His new book, Project Urban, sees descent as the grounds of urban planning,
but drawing attention to the work of fishers and scientists in climate change seats.
Nicholas also, of course, the author of the highly really well read book Hydraulics City previously.
OK, so with that, I'm going to hand over to Aditya to kick off the discussion.
Well, thank you, Michael, thank you so much for this invitation. I'm just going to get started, but I mean, what a privilege it is to be here.
I'm going to share my screen. I hope you can see it.
I mean, is that OK? Yes, we don't see it.
All right, perfect. Just give me a second.
Oops! OK, I'm just going to start.
So broadening this project, I mean, I've titled it archives and maps environmental justice,
and it largely focuses on China, but it's gone through many iterations.
And thank you for this opportunity to present one iteration, especially focussing on methods.
So let me start with the idea of pristine pasts, climate change and environmental history.
So this emerged, I don't think I need to report much of an introduction. Chennai is a city in the south in the southernmost tip almost of India.
It's located in the Bay of Bengal, or it's on the coastline of the Bay of Bengal.
And like many other South Asian cities, it's undergoing considerable amounts of turbulence in terms of climate.
But also many kinds of different thinkers are trying to rethink the city in terms of its water, its forests and its different types of ecology.
So the first thing I want to focus on is the river on the map that you see on your left is right in the middle of it,
you see the longwinded river that drains into the Bay of Bengal.
So historical mark from 1927 marked at the fringes of the map, to which inlets and outlets,
pumping stations of different types and a whole host of different kinds of water infrastructures to try and manage the river.
A narrative is imposed in Chennai, which suggests that actually two three hundred years ago,
before the British arrived, the Queen was in fact a pristine river that was flowing into the Bay of Bengal.
It had running water and several temples beside it.
It had battles that were fought on its banks and in fact was supported a fairly broad based economy.
But one of the questions that we posed of this presentation is in conjunction, at least with Bhavani Rahman,
although she probably doesn't hold any kind of liability in terms of what I said.
And one of the questions that we posed through our research on, for example,
the coin was whether there was actually such a signposts that existed in the first place.
And the relevance of this question is precisely because most of the engineers, the planners, the local government bodies led now by citizens,
middle class citizens of a city like Chennai are pushing to have something like the coin
made into a pristine river through forms of aesthetic through forms of beautification.
So one of the questions that we posed through our archive of research is to ask What's the ever pristine river as such?
And we do this actually by exploring the archives of the Corps. Luckily, Bhavani, the starting of early colonial India.
I'm a historian of late colonial 20th century India, and we go over the Archives of Engineering of Public Health and Housing to understand
that actually there were many hydro geographies that existed through this river,
and it was never actually characterised as a river in itself. Right.
So we found that there were parts of it that were estuaries. We found that parts of it were tanks.
We found that parts of it were agrarian fields. Parts of it were inundation canals, artifical drainage canals.
And together, we found that in from the 1860s, from the 1820s, the 1920s or so, the British remained succumbing to a tidal river.
Right. And actually,
then the post-colonial imaginary in a contemporary imaginary that tries to deal with climate change replicates this very mode of thinking,
which is to remake this river again into a tidal river, into a flowing river.
And this imagination actually stems very deeply from the British imagination.
So actually, what I wanted to do was to reflect a little bit on some of our methods.
In terms of some,
one is really the archival method where we try and disturb this idea of the pristine past in order to say that there are different futures that
we can think about in terms of our climatic present and our climatic future that we don't necessarily have to think in terms of imaginary,
such as the Tidal River. And actually, if you go back into history, you'll find that things like flowing rivers actually had multiple geographies,
multiple histories, multiple coincidences of land and water.
And this is embedded in a deep history of inequality, which I don't have time to come into and come to it at the moment,
but I'm happy to answer questions actually stemming from our preliminary research.
So this is one specific kind of case study that we're working on.
This map is again of Chennai. If the river that I showed you previously was the clue on this particular map is of the river idea.
It's a completely different map. It's a contemporary map. It's derived from a software street.
And if you look at the map closely, what you see in the graphics on top is that there's a satellite imagery,
there's open streets, map, OpenStreetMap and then there are a series of dates.
Right? So there's 1822 that 1854, this 1866, the 1917, 1947, 1970, 1989 and 2011.
So these are maps that we've actually gathered from archives.
And then so we have India, and then we've tried to digitise the audio river through roster and vector data.
Not us, but research associates assistance work study students who've all collaborated to try and create different maps of the area.
Right? Now, what does this fundamentally do so in mapping the area?
What is the question the grasping world of climate change, environmental change? The first is to rethink again the city of the river.
We see that the idea then is not a flowing river. It's not a river necessarily like the Thames or the sea,
and which in the 19th century was remade into aesthetic infrastructures with land speculation, with values going up.
And similar things are happening in China, around Adriano. But through these maps, we actually see that the idea of the Deep Blue Sea is notable.
And each map delivers a different kind of geography to the river,
which you start to understand with time and the way in which map makers are making those maps changed.
So there is a question about the city of the river and what do you do with that and how you deal
with that trying to be or not fixed debate the different kinds of land and water geographies.
The second kind of collaboration,
if the first one was about thinking about the river through this and using raston vector data to think through the river,
the idea river, the second collaboration that Bhavani and I are undertaking, is with the vertebrate collective in Chennai, right?
And these are actually alternative imaginaries of the streets of some of you might have seen the
activist and the energy of posts on Facebook and some articles with The Wire with the wire.
But he's in deep conversation with Parliament, whose official elder.
And who thinks about certain space of the idea that it's a very limited space through a slightly different thought,
three different framework than Descartes is in framework, which I'll just come to.
So Parliament is able to think about ideas of risk, ideas of decision making, ideas of adaptation.
He doesn't rely, for instance, on meteorological data.
It doesn't rely on how the fish trade on on on data that comes from the fishing boat into into China.
He doesn't rely on data from the dominant corporation, but rather creates his own kinds of data,
meets his own kinds of memories from the fact that he's been working with the sea for quite a long time.
And but it's a very local geography. It's a geography that is spans the length of, you know, an oral compound to the the mouth of the river.
And that's the geography that it really knows well and he's very, very confident about.
But what this does fundamentally is to rethink certain categories of the Cartesian map.
Right? And by this, I mean that when we put these two farms together, historical maps that have been geo referenced through time,
as well as narratives from Ballymena which rethink risk would rethink ideas of decision making,
how people adapt to different circumstances and actually what you get are different categories of how
you can map a particular space which doesn't necessarily rely on certain technologies necessarily,
but also doesn't rely only on oral narrative. There's a kind of merging of the two,
and this is where I come to my final point before I would stop is acting a kind
of broader point about how I'm thinking about environmental history to climate,
what I'm calling environmental history to climate studies? Right.
So very broadly, environmental history as a discipline started from, you know, thinking about forests, pastures and rivers.
So these were the three central drivers of environmental history in South Asia historiography in South Asia.
We can think of figures like my history, like Rohan D'Souza, who who've written on this predicament,
largely relying on ideas of colonial capitalism, relying on ideas of state, making Kishore Crispin's work and relying on ideas of community,
whether resistance or whether in terms of corruption and colonial capitalism largely has been a paradigm making idea in terms
of reverse that there's a difference between colonial making it robust and of pre-colonial ideas of how rivers existed.
And what I'm suggesting in a way through this work that we've been doing with the money as well as with some others,
is that actually maybe this this it's time to end this paradigm of doing environmental history as such, right?
And what I mean is that the two or three things that we're doing that I've been reflecting on,
that's quite different from what has happened previously.
First, and this is a bit troubling even to me, is that we take science quite for granted in many ways.
So one is that all of us, for instance, take the idea of the climate crisis as upon us.
But we're taking this for granted. We're not. So in more specific terms, what we're not doing is we're not interrogating the idea of geosciences.
So we're using, for instance, you're referencing techniques without necessarily we acknowledge it,
but without necessarily disturbing the idea that actually geosciences were a largely colonial discipline.
Right. So this is the first kind of departure that we're making.
The second is working in collective. Some of this work is actually impossible without doing.
I mean, it's not possible to do individually like people did in.
In the past, I don't know how to I mean, I guess I have some rudimentary knowledge about maps and you're referencing.
But I definitely can't understand the landscape in the way that parliament does.
I can't understand it for sure. Interviewer Right.
The thought and what is very interesting in what is emerging in at least an academic study is that
there seems to be a coexistence of multiple colleges without one trying to examine or study the other.
In other words, there's a coexistence of geography and referencing that the coexistence of archives has to coexist.
And so the activist media and as the coexistence of somebody like Ballymaloe,
who is a future leader and we actually noted a study from one another, we actually tried to draw draw from one another.
So actually, through this exercise, Bhavani and I realise we are unable to come up with analytical categories to capture this whole space.
It's become an impossibility to come up with an analytical category what we can at best to at this moment, because it's one it's so fast changing,
but two that it's actually more productive, probably to describe these various facets that are occurring together so analytically.
Then there is a struggle. But I think actually we might need to then draw up our analytical categories and try to grapple with climate change.
I think in some senses echoes almost 90 come out of his recent book Today on the Anthropocene and How We Try and Think About The Anthropocene.
And I think I'll stop there. Thank you. Thank you so much, officer.
What a great. Yeah, lots and lots of questions, and thank you so much for that.
I think we'll just be really move on to our next speaker, Professor Unger.
Got it, thank you, Anna Nicole. So I also have a PowerPoint presentation, so I brought that up quickly.
So. So this is just to sort of give a small fragment of the sort of thing that my colleagues and I are working on these days.
Let me just say, grapple with this. Just bear with me. Yeah, there we go.
And so I'm hoping everybody can see this.
So, um, so my work. I'm an urban planner by by training, by profession.
And it's really an honour to be invited to this wonderful forum and to participate in this exchange and and learning
from everyone else today and looking in absolutely amazing work on on climate change and the environment in general.
So. So as an urban planner, much of my work focuses on infrastructures and issues of land displacement.
For many years now, I've been looking at water supply dynamics in Karachi from a gender perspective.
And then lately, over the last couple of years, issues of land displacement,
evictions and now increasingly quite a lot of my work has has now turned to climate change related issues.
For instance, how climate change and climate adaptation challenges coalesce with issues of violence on ground.
For example, state led violence in the form of evictions and land displacement.
Disaster risk mitigation upgradation plans that are unleashed by, for instance, in Pakistan's National Disaster Management Authority.
What are the repercussions on ground when it comes to different kinds of communities,
from low income to to low and middle income, marginalised communities and so forth?
And how these dynamics will to coalesce with other kinds of vulnerabilities,
for instance, such as global warming and its impact on on the southern city.
So in most of my work, I use Karachi as a proxy to think about these kinds of issues.
Karachi is Pakistan's largest city, and it sort of also, I think, sort of resonates with a lot of the big city megacity,
global city dynamics that we see across other cities in the global south in some some ways.
Karachi's challenges of infrastructure development and water and global warming, etc. are not by any means unique.
They do resonate an echo with similar kinds of challenges that are taking place in cities such as Mumbai, for instance.
So in this quick presentation, I want to talk about a project that I'm involved in these days with my colleague,
Dr Jenny Cross, who's one of just over at the University of Edinburgh and and my colleague Sara MacLean,
was an architect and an open planner at the Karachi Urban Lab. So this is part of a project called Cool Infrastructures,
funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund, the UK Government and Life with Heat in the Auckland city.
And this particular project has many different permutations.
And I'll just very quickly give you a quick snapshot of one particular aspect that we're looking at today,
and this is about negotiating change in urban climates in South Asia.
And what does it mean to negotiate shade?
So just to give you a very quick background, could infrastructure as the three year project,
which aims to enhance understandings of the social and technical infrastructures for cooling in the context of urban poverty,
is the way we're looking at heat as a lens to think about vulnerability across cities like Jakarta,
Karachi, Hyderabad in India and the island in Cameroon, and specifically interested in looking at the materials, technologies,
relationships and forms of knowledge with which marginalised urban residents work to keep cool and overheating global cities.
So in the Karaj context, one of the questions that we ask is and this is coming out of Mike Davis's 1997 book Is Shade an inalienable right?
So, so in the context of heat and materiality and thinking about the colonial and
whiskering transformations the built environment in the South Asian city,
for instance, in Karachi, what? What is the relationship between labouring bodies and heat and thermal comfort?
And how might this relationship be embedded in the solidarity that permeate the built environment?
What is the quotidian context in which solar exposure is experienced and talked about in people's daily negotiations or finding shade?
And how does shade in the South Asian city become something that must be cleaned alongside other rights and entitlements?
That it might be something that is part of an intimate politics in which, for instance,
the ordinary citizen is ensconced in a relationship with the local state.
So how should we address the existing knowledge gap when negotiating rights to shape?
So this is coming out of some of the work that the United Nations has produced about how nearly
half of Southeast Asia's population lives in urban areas with shared often has an unexamined,
exempt quality of greening and public spaces, et cetera.
So we've been looking at the informal workers street vendors, for instance, who have a direct association with green or barren or shaded non-state.
Created public listening, public spaces as a karaoke arena of economic activity and trade,
and their occupancy in certain spaces is often characterised as informal.
The spaces in which they work, which are often came to occupy through negotiation and outcome what we call an everyday and intimate politics.
So in the graduate context, this is particularly interesting because Karachi suffered sort of experienced an unprecedented heat wave in 2015,
where temperatures rose to 45 degrees Celsius and and and I recorded 100 plus deaths at that point in time.
But when I see unprecedented from historical perspective, there have been other moments of high heat exposure in in the regional sense,
maybe not specific to Karachi, but certainly in other parts of Central.
So this particular event was then spurred on by Heat Action Plan that the central
government and the Karachi government specifically took sort of rolled out.
So we're looking at this issue of how these sort of the challenge of how these heat
action plans both limits and kind of constrain the idea of how heat should be managed
and and specifically in terms of sort of its focus on heat events rather than thinking
about heat as something that is more long term or as as chronic heat exposure.
So, so in this context,
we're also looking at sort of how the colonial post-colonial context of Karachi has changed not only through colonial colonial interventions,
but also post-colonial interventions in which different kinds of materials have been have become popular in the shaping of the built environment.
So what was typical in the colonial context, where the question could be found quite commonly in the in the in the in the construction of buildings,
something that sort of now is not so common to the sort of Karachi built environment,
and you will find this kind of construction that is limited to very specific parts of the city.
And where sort of this this sort of glass and and concrete appears to have become or has become a more dominant sort of material that
is used in the reshaping of the built environment today and a certain kind of a verticality that has also become quite popular.
So in this context, we've been looking at how public parks and green spaces in Karachi are also decreasing because of urban
development and infrastructure development and these large scale projects and also have accompanied sort of a
decline in terms of the sort of the medium trees where informal vendors and informal labourers typically kind
of confine themselves because that is where a large sort of part of the of the sort of the shade comes from.
So these roadside medium trees have areas have become waiting spaces where you
will find all trees like the bunny or the burqa or the name of the people,
which also fast disappearing. And these provide sort of shaded pockets of space.
The small kiosks that are later on displays by recently planted imported species like the corner copies.
So over the last year or so, we've been talking to street vendors in specific parts of the city, typically around what is known as the Empress Market,
which is part of the Old City or the native city,
which was also reconfigured quite a bit during colonial rule and where many of these street vendors can today be found.
And and we've been talking to them about sort of where do they hang out typically in, you know,
in parts of the city where finding shaded spaces has become increasingly hard because trees are being
cut down and green spaces are declining or access to green spaces has also become highly privatised.
So, so we find interesting sort of, you know,
conversations that emerged from our surveys and our open ended conversations where street vendors, for instance,
tell us that they find spots underneath trees and and they also find challenges in terms of hanging on to these spots because these are claims to,
you know, to find shade that are based on informal arrangements with the local municipal corporation, which is the Guide Municipal Corporation.
So the right to the shaded space for street vendors, for instance, hinges on their ability to pay informal rents to the Karachi Municipal Corporation.
And and then we went on to interview. For instance,
women try fruit sellers who typically use umbrellas to find shaded spaces and and they talked about
how when they feel the sun and they feel the solar exposure and they feel the switch of the heat,
the question of thermal comfort becomes particularly challenging because for them,
it's not just a question of the body overheating due to a solar exposure, but literally the ground where they sit on also becomes incredibly hot.
So throughout the day,
they can't even take off their sandals because it's so hard the food gets ruined and that space sort of the space where they hang on to,
you know, to sell their wares. You know, it's not something that they can easily give up.
So to sort of escape from their kids or to find a shaded spot elsewhere.
Becomes an increasingly big challenge. So in the context of these kinds of conversations,
we're also thinking about how these words right exemplify the sort of the physically intense and hazardous
hazardous thresholds of bodily capacities as street vendors attempt to manage the thermal load on their bodies.
And so can heat management practises be understood in terms of how sort of they're attuned to certain kinds of rhythms and their potentials for,
you know, for re articulation? How might we move to a rhythm analysis of the South Asian city when we talk about thermal practises?
So I'll move on very quickly. So been talking to security guards and uniforms also in terms of their time of discomfort,
which are often aggravated by heavy layers of clothing and also to construction workers and, you know, thinking about their vulnerability to heat.
So finally, in a sort of, you know, around the south very quickly.
So in the South Asian city, what we see is that shade is not an inalienable human right.
On the contrary, shade as a political material achievement, perhaps an outcome of an intimate politics.
So I'll stop right there. I want to go on. I can go on endlessly about this.
So these findings are part of of a paper that is going to be coming out very soon, which my colleague Jamie Cross and so on.
I co-authored.
And we hope that is the sort of work that will also engender greater conversations on how we think about heat in the context of the South Asian city,
both in the colonial and in the postcolonial contemporary context.
Thank you. Thank you so much for watching.
Super fascinating. Thanks a lot. Will you come back to some of these questions?
Camelia. Can you see the presenting slide or the yes?
The problem was that it's not the notes. OK. So thank you so much for having I'm very privileged to be part of these conversations
and so many thoughts in my mind that I'll save for later when we all discuss research.
So thank you again for inviting me. OK, so I'll just start with how I ended up researching climate change.
In the autumn of 2011, I met with Dr. Mohammed as I was finishing 12 months of qualitative research on
an internationally funded water governance project in Bangladesh's coastal zone.
My field trips to my attention to several urgent problems that are rural interlocutors had raised from saline or brackish Typekit
cultivation that damage flood protection embankments to canal filled up with heavy sediment each year dying an image like this one.
But the water and the beach mass and the sluice gates and I have many of my
findings about the contentiousness of infrastructure and land use practises.
And I sought to explore these issues further in a new project and began asking fellow researchers I met during the year,
such as Dr. Muhammad, how to best pursue this or how to get our money for our future.
So when I mentioned my interest in land use and siltation as we set in Gulshan Taco Funds,
this neighbourhood bustling with international development professionals.
He commented on the increasing amount of financial support for climate change research, and he said,
Whatever you want to do for a fee, make sure you add climate change to your project title and get fund.
All of this advice, I did get several state offers,
I wondered whether this inclusion of climate change deflected attention away from the most pressing
concerns that arose during the climate change has become a buzzword used to track donor funding.
And in my research, I study climate change by investigating climate change knowledge production.
Change shape, the direction of development interventions in the global south.
To what extent is this correspond with the concerns of the people that they seek to help?
And can climate change as a development buzzword help save the rivers and canals of the
Bengal delta in the future of climatic uncertainties like return to Bangladesh in 2014?
To explore these questions further on World Rivers Day,
I accompanied my friend Sandy to a workshop organised by grassroots environmental movement in south west coast of Bangladesh.
We arrived on foot to the basement parking area of a simple three storey plastic brick building in central Kona City,
and the concrete space was filled with several rows of plastic chairs facing a table with a large poster with the words City.
The main panellists, all Bangladeshi, sat at the table and there was a woman activist and a rights based and Bill,
a lawyer at the New Zealand IL professor from the local university.
There was no fan, no air conditioning. In so many places.
And entirely in Bangla with no presence at English speaking international owners.
The man. Proof. Which?
Only A. Because this network or movement does not depend on,
or at least to attract donor funding and the participants each voice their personal views
on pressing environmental problems in the coastal region and the different ways canals,
rivers and water bodies were being harmed by human interventions, both from the past and in the present.
One of the participants, Amir, spoke about these 1960s donor funded coastal embankments that have resulted in 4000
kilometres of flood protection embankments throughout the coastal zones of these.
This is a map from my old research on indictments, and these methods are similar to the colonial predecessors that enabled reveals
to crisscross the Banco Delta as professor figure equal rights in a similar way.
They prevent silt clad river water from flooding that will take planes and have resulted in the silt,
instead depositing outside the embankments and raising the riverbed. In the first part of my book that provides the environment the history of this,
and that's how this is common knowledge amongst them addresses as also eloquently put by Amir that points out that during the monsoon,
the raised riverbeds prevent the rainwater inside the embankment from draining out the river outside.
And as you can see on this image here, the land outside the embankment is higher than the land inside.
So during the monsoon, heavy rainwater bhatia water gets trapped inside because they cannot fill out full back out into the river.
And this creates a flood called Jolla floods, and they talk about different types of floods.
In my book So Vulnerable to floods, this translates as water logging or drainage congestion, and it's very harmful to crops.
And this type of elevation difference is also also increases the risk of tidal surges.
And I'm you pointed out, since the creation of embankments, the river sediment has nowhere to go.
And our rivers and canals are setting up their dying embankments are causing riverbed rise and waterlogging.
These issues have no link to sea level rise.
Even Bangladesh's most famous water specialist never mentioned sedimentation because of pressure from international donors.
We are not able to do anything. We may continue this movement for the environment, but we are a voice against voiceless, against those and Hakam.
So he said this and refers to how many donors were funding embankments as a new form of climate adaptation infrastructure.
So misreading the Bengal delta contrasts the narratives of climate funded projects with
local environmental history and the lived experiences of social and environmental problems.
And it differentiates between physical processes of climatic change that we are seeing
and the discursive ideas of climate as the main cause of change climate change.
This discusses how climate change can be a powerful, discursive phenomenon that alters expectations of causality.
And it's important to remember that the Bengal delta has an innate ability to adapt a certain amount of sea level rise silt.
Evolving waters can raise existing lines if the rivers are allowed to flood the plains.
For example, in the UNinvite Sun, the mangroves, Boshoff floods, monsoon floods,
raise land levels each year, and banking the delta prevents such floods and the silt instead.
Deposits outside the embankments embrace the but levels, as I just showed you.
And what's interesting is the images of water are being used to portray climate refugees, such as in this image.
So this is a typical image of water logging. But and embankments are seen as a solution.
And to me, that's the.
But as natural scientists close to us on the floods,
the Dutch are now recasting these very same embankments known to silt up rivers since colonial times as climate adaptation infrastructure.
Can you hear me OK? Yes, we can. Yeah, I got a warning.
And so. This critique is important because silting up of the delta reduces these countries ability to withstand irregular precipitation patterns,
long and dry seas and the increased frequency of tropical cyclones and tidal surges that are expected to come in are already,
to a certain extent, happening. So in order to properly address issues of climatic change,
we must understand how environmental processes are linked together and entangled with infrastructures.
And we can no longer remove embankments. But we must find a way to engage in silt management and take into account that meandering rivers
like the youngest Brahmaputra make now will result in embankments constantly eroding and breaking,
requiring regular maintenance funds that donors do not want to fund, but embankments.
As climate adaptation is only one of many ways in which Bangladeshi development professionals attract aid funding rather than anti-politics,
machine or hegemonic development was dictated by donors.
Another speaker at the workshop I attended, Mr Shahid,
revealed how Bangladesh's themselves participate in creating these links between projects for climate change.
Well aware of their own role in perhaps obscuring local environmental problems such as that of embankments western situation, he said.
Climate change is the most amazing place.
Climate change, poverty alleviation agenda and you will have a recipe for success for your development project.
But will this recipe help save the river?
My ethnographic research examines the brokerage undertaken by local Bangladeshi development professors and professionals in climate funded projects.
I show how Bangladeshi government workers partake in assemblages constituting a multiple heterogeneous development actors,
donors, NGOs, state units and consultants that come together to create a common development project.
The theoretical framework of the book is based on the concept of climate reductive translations.
Climate reductionism, a term coined by my Q, refers to the increasing tendency to attribute all changes in environment and society to climate.
The policy theory in Bangladeshi climate change projects tend to be climate reductive.
The country will drown due to rising sea levels caused by global warming climate.
Reductive translations thus help conceptualise how different climate projects produce coherent,
how they create causal narratives linking their development interventions to the policy theory of climate change.
And in some instances, this may worsen environmental problems, and in others, it might actually help address local livelihood concerns.
And this the result will depend on the actors that work together in creating the project.
So here is an image of a climate adaptation project funded by Brazil and Japan that was very popular in my field site.
It hired landless agricultural day labourers, provide the rural training and hired them to widen and deepen have these sorts of canals in the area.
The project envisage that this would create a greater absorption capacity of monsoon rains that are expected to increase with climatic variability.
And this also allows for water storage from the monsoon to the dry season, providing a space for fishing and irrigation as a public common.
So this was hugely popular and want to touch.
One of briefly touched on is the first part of my book The History of Flood Protection Embankments,
as well as how I see a rise development brokerage and climate projects. And in the remaining book,
I look at how brackish shrimp aquaculture as climate adaptation fails to take into account the purposeful
colonisation of the soil and how that can be reversed and engaging more with feminist political ecology.
And the fourth chapter,
I look at the history of agriculture and environmental change in the wake of the Green Revolution and the introduction of high yielding chemicals,
because several donors are now casting this as a form of climate adaptation to help ensure food security very similar to mosses and discourses.
And I john multi-species ethnography to explore the concept of the life force,
and I discuss how climate reductive translation of intensive agriculture as adaptation is
unsustainable as it contributes to biodiversity loss and long term soil acidification.
And the final chapter gives voice to the main livelihood concerns of my challengers, how they perceive coastal vulnerabilities in their own words,
and how this has little to no relation to climatic change such a broader issues of social inequalities and structural violence.
So the question then is what happens when livelihood resources cannot be captured through a climate lens?
And I think that's an important part discussed as well. And thank you for your time, and I'll just stop here.
Thank you so much, give India a pretty grim picture reading your book, so thanks for this short and sharp cirrhosis.
OK, so we're next onto. Thank you.
I just done this on one second. Can you all see my screen and hear me clearly, I'm seeing a blank screen.
I don't know if that's it. No, and it just means I have to ask and I don't want to start doing something like, you know, putting.
It should be this. Does it work now?
Yes, perfect. Beautiful. Yeah. Okay. All right. Thank you.
Thanks so much for organising this and for inviting me to join this awesome panel.
I'm going to dive right in. So my current project looks at how techno scientific images I'm thinking of.
Braff's surveys and better infographics shape how we understand and experience climate change, and also how they shape landscapes that we inhabit.
Which is to say, I'm interested in looking at how images are not just representations of change out there,
but have social and material consequences that drive that change. And I'll explain what I mean to one set of technical scientific images.
And these are images that are posted put India's shoreline.
I also work with drawings, particularly comics. And so the slide, you see those drawings.
And hopefully, this will give you a sense of how I think of drawing as a method.
And in doing it, no graphic research.
So in the early hours of July 31, 2012, the inhabitants of Morocco, which is a fishing village in Mumbai,
were beaten by the looming presence of Envy movie about a seventy seven metre long oil tanker.
The Coast Guard cast the event as a breach of national security and promised more rigorous routine patrols for Mumbai's nearshore fishing communities.
The police this height, this meant heightened surveillance of coastal waters increase control over boat licences,
and there was the danger that bob it would move with the tide and crash into the village.
Events like a beach tanker and governmental responses to it are windows into the
fundamental disjuncture between the usual fishing and contemporary coastal management.
The divergences are most apparent of the agency to to the non-humans of the shoreline.
For instance, while the fishing community spoke of it as an agent that caused a chain of reaction set within a verbal,
socioeconomic and ecological relationships,
the state government treated it as an agent that had breached the line crossing into and guest editorial workers.
So the question I begin with is how do lines appear on the shore, especially over water?
This understanding of beach lines is the direct consequence of India's coastal regulatory zone policy, or CR-Z,
that organises the coast, is a bounded territorial unit where resources can be mobilised and borders secured.
Since the postal policy is fundamentally about controlling space, psychographic drawings are vital for implementing it.
The visual this visual control graphic drawings allow allows the government to implement broad based policies in a tightly managed space.
Which is which, and this tightly managed space simplifies fluid and complex relationships that sustain vibrant communities and economies.
For example, to implement the CRC, one of the most important things is the creation of is to demarcate the high tide line as
the extent of the caustic substance are only comprehensible in relation to this thing.
And this is this line of work you are showing in my schematic drawing from 1991, when the first YAZID policy was released.
The languid extent of the coast was simply offset from the high tide line as a parallel line at a distance of 500 metres,
which continues to be this manner of identifying the.
It does not take into account any land features such as mountains or cliffs,
but simply denotes the high tide line as a line that is placed on a cartographic map.
As from a bird's eye view.
Subsequent notifications have kept the high tide line measured over 10 years as the main line that determines the languid extent of the coast.
The 2018 CRC Notification two follows this convention, where the landward edge of the coastal zone is simply offset from the high tide line.
So for the most part, high and low tide lines were established by examining on established by examining
high resolution satellite imagery along with bathymetric and tidal records.
However, with each iteration, as you can perhaps tell from the schematic drawings of the policies, the number of subdivisions have multiplied.
The CIA is a policy assumes that the availability of high resolution services makes the process of growing the force relatively straightforward,
which is to say that given a green space in Soviet technology. Satellite images can provide an accurate and immediate image of the coast.
So I guess this is it.
Yeah, this creates the sense that the coast is at once comprehensible and increasingly there was a boat to a greater and greater degree.
This accuracy, an immediate immediacy, is directly linked to new forms of extractive environmental regimes because it
allows the AI to atomised the pools as a bundle of resources with fixed potential.
During 2011 2012, I was doing fieldwork in Mumbai's fishing communities amongst families engaged in unusual fishing in a village called Maloney,
which is north of the place where part of it was a beach.
And like this year, it Neosho Fishing takes the post as a fluid entity, which is sustained by complex interdependencies between humans and humans,
and I suggest it offers openings to see and draw the post differently.
Nearshore fishing involves a number of improvisational moves that happen in close association with the post,
especially with the Creek, the creek and inlet of water,
but the sea slips into the land mass and their freshwater from lakes and runoff
holes into the sea is an extremely important element in fishing and coastal life.
The beginning and end of the fishing season is marked by changes in the behaviour as a chance with the monsoon and is quite enough for the rains.
This behaviour is also a sign to determine the depth that wish to fish as a creek and
see what a thought of as a mixture that is either stirred or still for the fishers.
Creeks, estuaries and bays offer a measure of protection from the direct action of the sea.
Places to park their boats and when the fish open the sea is a place to fish.
Given how fishers actively shape the creek and are shaped by it,
it can be thought of as a blue in which uncertainty citizens risks and possibilities of fishing circulate.
The CEOs, it completely overlooks this point, as it posits an unchanging relationship between the officials and, of course, the landscape.
It assumes that the clique has an integral, unchanging form and its plans end up creating a premium shore.
Such a languid understanding of the shore comes out of long histories of solving
and drawing that reappropriated and drained of fluid coastal waters as property.
An important outcome of this study and reordering is that it shows the posting
of bounded areas that can be disciplined to prevailing policy perspectives,
and this is from the Fisheries Department. As far as policies are concerned, Indian fisheries go, that outlook is always been growth oriented.
The bounded areas in the has it become the basis for calculating the potential of the fisheries industry,
which is often described as a sunrise sector with boundless capacity for growth?
The fisheries industry policies are informed by long held belief that there is a lot more fish out there than is captured annually.
This is a legacy of the first blue revolution that began in the 1950s,
when the Indian government initiated a large-scale programme to modernise fishing boats and to increase the annual fishing use.
This policy has. This trend has continued in recent policies, which promote intensive fishing practises such as fishing and busting netting.
And more recently, inland farm fishing, despite evidence of increasing signs of stress on fish stock.
This is a community based small-scale fishers, the most pushing them into continuing cycles of debt and poverty.
Policies like the Second Blue Revolution, which was launched in 2015 by the Department of Fisheries,
translate the area of fishing zones into potential catch, a number that is supposed to show your growth.
This is most apparent in the graphs that are published at the central and state level.
Year after year, this graph is expected to maintain its upward trend.
As this blast graph follows its vertical trajectory,
it enters the complex human non-human relationships that sustain small scale nearshore fishing and fishing economies.
Because they're less intensive, small-scale fishing practises,
things in the smaller total annual yield, for example, in the fishing season between 2010 and 11.
Nearly 500000 tonnes of fish caught in the state of Maharashtra.
Out of this, one hundred and forty three thousand tons of fish recorded on the shores of Mumbai,
which accounts for just under 30 percent of the state's catch. And you look at the small cluster of fishing villages where I did my fieldwork.
Average practise predominantly Neosho fishing accounted for just under three percent of the entire state's yearly catch,
and that's a drop in the bucket, according to the Maharashtra department's fisheries estimates.
Each mechanised boat, the boat that's normally used for nearshore fishing, made an average of 91 efforts that year.
The dome effort is basically each time that a boat costs and holds back its nets.
So now this statistic can be read in different ways.
It can be taken as the government does as a sign of lack, that small-scale fishing is not a viable practise,
is unsophisticated or traditional, nor conducive to economic growth.
It can bring home the biggest lives officials lead and the tight margins in which they operate,
since each mechanised vessel only ventures out once and feeds,
according to the statistic, making it all the more important to maximise the potential of each catch.
However, the other way to think about the statistic that it is an outcome of an inherent aspect of small-scale fishing,
unlike the coast, is a zone of quantified potential. Small-Scale fisheries create the coastal interdependencies that work in the long and short term.
This should not be taken to mean that small-scale fishing lacks technological or economic sophistication, or the numbers in court are irrelevant.
Instead, it should be taken to mean that the ways in which small-scale fishing organises the coast makes it far more sustainable in the long term.
So hopefully, this example gives a good sense of the larger project on how drawings manifest as the shore,
and the project itself follows a fourth thought. So firstly, I'm interested in looking at how the ideas of accuracy, accuracy,
immediacy and similar tenacity that are central to techno scientific images and their developmental outcomes getting muddled as they did with LAG.
What are more than human bodies? However, I'm also interested in the business of crafting openings and also because I love signals scientific images.
So even though a number of images spread the futures of sharpened and given over to development,
I'm also interested in looking at how images and acts of drawing them up towards a critical climate politics.
And this really is the larger political commitment in drawing from anthropology as
a way of facing the climate crisis and thinking with anthropology and drawing.
Thanks to throw a totally stunning woman, he had one question about how you presented this beautiful, you know, these beautiful drawings.
So for the person who does that, I think to throw them asset register, so all the drawings in the asset are great.
Thank you. We come back to some of the questions you've just raised here, some of the points.
So onto Nicole, last, but not the least. And again, I think staying with mobility.
Thank you so much. And it is looking at all good.
Can you hear me now? Yes. You. All right. Thanks so much, Nicole, for creating this wonderful conversation.
I have learnt for some time now from the work of our fellow panellists that you brought us together to today and then
been thinking with colleagues about the need to think realistically across these coastal megacities of South Asia.
So thank you for making it happen.
It's a real pleasure to actually follow Chiozza, a paper on Waste Conservation, a published last month or two months ago.
Now, I guess, is brilliant for those that want to learn more about the possibilities and potential Detroit coastline.
That's terrific. OK, so let me just jump right in.
This from an early day in April 2019,
before the past presidents times of the pandemic that I went out fishing with my and his crew in the waters of could be what at the time,
between December and March of generally peak fishing season, April was still a good time to fish locally, for sure.
For now, anxious about getting the good catch on the few fishing days that remained before the monsoons arrived.
And this is something we can also think about two inches. I talked about 91 days of effort.
Fishing times are quite different from the high rates of the fishers are now anxious
about getting a good catch and the water as pictured here with a beautiful green,
blue and very calm. But my guess? We're not happy seeing it like this.
The water has changed, he told me when I asked him what he thought of his prospects that day.
This colour is not so great for catching Pomfret. He said a few days ago, this kid colour of chocolate.
That water is good for comfort. What I was reading as a beautiful clear water, he implied, in contrast, was not so much.
He was right and we caught a few fish that day.
They begin this with this inventive thought describe the ways in which fish read and act the city's changing terrain to dwell in the urban sea.
And I'm taking care a lot with the work, but also with the work of the people of China and Russia,
who have also recently described how fish are keenly attuned to the dynamics of colour
tide and when to make livelihoods in the city that they inhabit a city in the sea,
one which is always in flux. But their keen reading of their water is also revealed.
Another truth that's termed that opaque waters of water are full of stuff continued to accompany the stunning depths of human and animal life.
This is for bacteria, for fish and also in relation for fishes.
And that is something to learn from experts and residents of the city to learn here.
Those who continue to imagine that the city is built on stable, dry ground,
even as a sudden ground is always collapsing under our feet and every now almost accustomed for the city to report sinkholes,
Mumbai attacks follow cars or buses every now and then.
In my current research, I ask what we might make of climate change treaties if we shift understanding from imagining we
live under a land landmark and bounded by coastlines to living in the sodden and muddy worlds.
Well, for the teeming with life, toxics and discoloured wealth in which transparency is dead and muddy worlds full of possibility.
In my research, I examine how urban worlds are imagined and made possible with water, not just because waters of significant contemporary concern,
but also because it provides a different lens with which to understand urban space and politics.
Scholars have argued of social theory,
has thus fostered a predilection for science as a to it McLean's luck in generating key concepts or understandings of the world.
Think of the language with which he describes theory of personal development stories in the world.
Settle, Grounded, noted, were full of terrestrial metaphors.
In my new book, Urban sees a race of coastlines of Mumbai to ask how the city is made in the cities, and in doing so,
this project congeal by thinking with the work of the driving conviction on the design of the lipstick with the of this approach.
The studies of land and topology, objects and geography, I thought,
would be there as available for the making of property and real estate wealth on a provincial land and urban planning for some time now.
Urban planning ends at the coastline. See its land use planning.
A planner told me Mumbai was being sued a few years ago. An historian, John Precautious, argues that had been made by colonisation,
a military colonisation of Indians by the British and the colonisation of nature and in particularly the sea by culture.
While British colonisation ended in 1947, the terrestrial cities colonisation of the sea continues to this day.
Scholars have shown how the doctrine of terra nullius, a land claimed by no one,
was keep the establishment of settler colonies in the Americas in Australia.
I think The Simpsons will just like land, so it's water and not just in the new world, but many other worlds.
The greatest colonial city that we've been hearing about today, but also Mumbai, Chennai, Karachi.
And look at that, but also New York,
Singapore and others have not been made by declaring this these wetlands and titled regions and rivers as useless as empty.
They are created by no. One by terra nullius. But up until this?
Going to work on indigenous rights in Australia, indigenous water rights legal scholar Virginia Marshall,
the ongoing set of legal manoeuvres by the Australian states to not rising into the water bodies
on the one hand and to see land and water as distinct formations and property law on the other,
even though the realities are always more money.
I'm very excited, but I think to some, the workshop many years ago looks like the publication is, I thing with my check.
Also, the doctrine of Aqua Nullius show that equanimity is, of course,
the fiction fiction brought into being to permeate both legally and figuratively.
The colonisation of water. Isabel Hofmeyr has called hydro colonialism by the master, the property and real estate.
As some have pointed out, we are living in a world in which and after the legacies of these two intersecting and overlapping crises of colonisation
exist at the same moment of time of European colonisation and colonisation of water each of precipitated by capitalism.
These ongoing legacies of colonisation and simultaneously manifest in Mumbai's Coastal Road,
ongoing coastal road project and amongst this project that seeks to solidify the sea to render it fit for human traffic.
And you see here the master and the left hand side of the visualisation, a rendering of obstacles, the road project, but it's complete.
I'm not sure if you can see my point, but I'm on the right corner of the picture.
You see that little picture of the risks of the monarch's free racecourse,
which itself was made by a colonisation of the sea and reclamation work in the 1920s,
following which you now see the layers of the new road that are added to that.
To that picture of a project that has been realised to this day,
as you see with the land for a picture taken last year on the right look at come forward a lot faster in the emergency's of the coronavirus pandemic.
A third of the project is about the construction of the road, which will host the city's burgeoning fossil fuel car population.
It's a $3 billion subsidy under the subsidy for capitalist modernisation to intensify the climate crisis.
The coastal road didn't come out of nowhere. Most recently, it's a 70 year old plan to modernise the city, the building of coastal highways.
And yet it is also a continuation of four to century long history of building Mumbai in the sea periodic and consistent coastal reclamation.
Most often taken place outside us and often despite the city for development planning process.
And it's made often of the city's bubble and rift. This has been a very profitable project.
Yet these two, essentially the landfill, have not just made Mumbai a megacity, it has also,
as my friend pointed out and I quote the vision of the city against the sea for production of a coastline that constantly needs to be fortified.
As I've written about elsewhere to produce the city that's even more vulnerable to flood,
and it does so by forgetting the livelihoods of fishers in the occupied Gitai or geographies.
To work in the urban sea is to work in the ongoing story of more than human occupation with which life flows and life societies are made.
I'm thinking here with the work done on heroine Catherine McKittrick.
We've talked about this power of stories to make worlds, and I've been working with social scientists and partners to hone in on these senses
of reading the city in the sea sentences with examples of which I opened with today.
But I also do so both against biographer and in collaboration with many others.
I'm thinking a little bit about the parallel companion projects happening in intimate that other I talked about earlier because the
world is sort of composed of these different projects that are made sensible through different kinds of techniques and technologies.
And so here the work with Fisher and scientists and planners is also collaborative in a way that seeks
to make sense of and fitting together without trying to resolve them into a single analytical frame.
So the I should have introduced the slide that I put up a little bit earlier,
this is a slide from the inhabited fee project that I worked with several other,
including at the mouth of the canal and colleagues to comment on that and to many others to me.
But you can find them on the uninhabited sea website. The climate.
Climate change presents a crisis for academic research, not just in terms of an epistemic crisis,
in terms of the collapsing of natural history in human history. And so I've described it chocolatey quite recently or not so recently,
but also how scholar my tax and participate in the world that have been carved up by disciplinary knowledge is after the challenge.
Them critiques have been posited by this movement, called the Anthropocene.
These different ways of knowing it's one of the points that earlier are hard to all of them, and I'm eager to learn.
But whenever that's needed to think together with colleagues and co-travellers in this process,
learning with Earth scientists, urban planners, fishers and as well as oceanographers in this research.
Nevertheless, even these pathways of doing research are too slow and not enough.
I recall the words of a colleague, Leonard Cohen,
who talked about how he couldn't wait to do this work because if he waited for the usual awkward initialisation of tenure,
like it would be seven years to make it right.
The time the time is now to engage in the world beyond the academy and getting the most beyond university and so on.
So I'm trying to do that in some of the ongoing work, and we talk more about that more of a discussion.
But thank you all for your time and also to think with you all.
And critical. Absolutely fabulous. What a fantastic set of presentations and talks by all of you.
Thank you so much. It's been brilliant. Just to pick up on the point that Nicole ended on and I can actually already see a couple
of questions on on this on this very theme of sort of speaking beyond the academy.
Perhaps I can ask my colleague Nicholas Sude to ask the question for us because it's sort
of linked two to one that you would have been talking about an email and think about.
Would you like to go ahead and ask a question, please? Yeah. Can you hear me?
Yes, we can hear you. Hi, everyone. Thanks very much for your presentations.
It was nice to put names of faces to some of the stuff I've been reading from
all of you to bring together the teams off the different presentations you.
You all spoke about the materiality of land and the sea and coast, but you also spoke about unfixable.
Several of you use that word as also relational with the off, you know, land what flora and fauna?
And you spoke about everyday lives and livelihoods,
and I was struck by how far you know you are from those sort of sterile climate change discourses that have come to dominate discussion about,
I don't know, adaptation resilience, which almost either put the global south in some sort of vulnerability box or, you know,
it's very hard to imagine the kinds of richness that you bring into your presentations in that kind of discourse.
And yet we can't afford to have these on two separate tracks. So how does your work and this is for any of you, how does your work?
How can it be made to speak productively to those sort of unfortunately, more mainstream discussions?
Who would like to sort of jump in on this notion, please go ahead.
Going to make it then. Thank you very much. That's such a fabulous question.
That is something that I grapple with every day that, you know, the kind of academic work that I do with my colleagues.
How do we make it relevant in policy terms, essentially?
So I think sort of in a in a very simple sense, a sort of sort of the heat project that I'm involved in these days,
which I hope is going to extend forward in many other ways because my colleagues and I find
it's such a critical engagement on so many levels with so many different permutations.
Just thinking about adaptation means that, you know, how do you tap into local forms of urban knowledge on on,
you know, on standards of historical standards and contexts of cooling practises, for instance?
So what does adaptation mean when you leverage it from the ground up?
And so, so I think this question of urban knowledge and its relationship with labouring bodies becomes a very critical one.
So that adaptation thinking about adaptation and vulnerability isn't something that is just not done.
And I should say, actually, it's the question of vulnerability and thermal exposure.
And global warming is not is no longer just a global sales phenomenon, it's it's actually a global phenomenon and also today.
So we only have to see what was happening in Greece and then southern parts of Europe last year in terms of the fires and and the heatwaves.
So this is this is like, you know, this has become increasingly a global issue.
So it's becoming harder to kind of sort of think of these sort of these operators, right?
These these lines in terms of the kind of knowledge that can produce so so that,
you know, vulnerability is something that is only about the global south. And you know, everything is OK in the global north.
So so I think thinking about.
So for us, it's thinking about local urban knowledge, about resilience, about adaptation, about cooling, about people, their bodies,
how they they deal with issues of thermal comfort,
and that these have perhaps longer contextualised histories of practise of knowledge that is related to materiality.
And how can one find a way to to level this up in terms of framing policy agendas?
And of course, this is a huge challenge. This is by no means something that can happen automatically.
So in the end, you know, in the Pakistan context, no one talks to academics, right?
So much of what we produce kind of gets lost out there.
And but it also means that we push harder in terms of how we produce our knowledge, how we how we make it,
how we disseminate it, how it reaches out to communities, practitioners and so forth.
So I think that's where some of the bigger challenges lie. I hope I've been able to answer this question from my perspective, at least.
Thank you. Thanks, Bush, you would like to, Nicole, go ahead.
Thanks for that question, it's a really good one, and I think that we have been trying to link experiments with an improvised in the
doing of the response to a question is very much as it's a workable of right.
If it's about being a scholarly knowledge production and thinking about it and also finding ways to interfere in these debates,
because the ways in which the climate crisis is addressed and planned for it will have
bearings on how people are able to live in the future and not just be aware of a crisis,
you know, for the consolidation of power and the powerful already which is in crisis typically do what we've seen in this pandemic, right?
So. So this includes work like writing in newspapers to to intervene and reframe the conversations,
to think about planning in, to use my friend to connect to them and also working with city planners.
Currently draughting his climate action plan to not only think from the ground for wetness,
but also to to to to push and to question and to urge a rethinking of who or what kind of office
people having knowledge or people had and what what counts as data brought into these processes,
but also whose lives are grounded in the kinds of strategies that are that are framed right now.
It's one thing to plan for a coming climate crisis if it's quite another to recognise that people
are already living in environments of severe housing and water vulnerability in the present moment.
So how can the climate crisis be an opportunity to to address some of those issues as opposed to to reproduce them again,
as we see with the material for retribution, with the material for a project, for the later by following this conflict with other types of questions.
The other added that she's glad.
Thanks. Thanks, Doctor. I think that's I mean, the really interesting question, I guess I have a slightly different take on it.
You know, and so much of it is political.
What I have gone, we recently observed, is that with the change of government, at least in Tamil Nadu, from any DMK to it to DMK government,
suddenly there's a willingness to I mean,
there was always a process of engaging whether it was through the court or whether it was through interventions in the master plan.
And this is something that, you know, especially the actors collectives have been doing for quite a while.
And and I suppose, you know, official groups who had to had to engage these processes necessarily.
But but with with this time in government, which is, of course, a much larger process that you really have no control over,
obviously, we have no control over when suddenly something seems to have shifted, that seems to be an openness to actually engaging.
And this is, I think at the moment it is very Tamil Nadu specific icon, you know, in more in work for lack of a better word.
You know, BJP government, right wing state, I don't know what's what, what the situation is,
but it seems to be so context dependent on how disengagement happened. That's one.
And even within that, I found, you know, and we've taken a lot of inspiration from because of collectives of Anthropocene.
There's there seems to be a lot more willingness on the part or even even the ones.
We should take some disciplines more seriously than others and some disciplines less seriously than others.
And I suppose we've done some. I mean, all we're trying to do some, you know,
creative mobilisation around this that somebody becomes the front end and somebody becomes the back end.
And how you play that game a little bit is also, I suppose, quite important.
But I mean, these are the strategies to, as Nicole said, you know,
people are already living this and because our interventions are going in in the background, in some this.
So I have to say, in my experience, anthropologist in the least, seriously,
as a discipline, they have to see, I think they will compete for that honour with history.
Well, I guess it is. I could just say, you're an anthropologist.
Cynthia's eyes glaze over. There's nothing you can say that's of any use Chitra.
Please go ahead. Thanks. You know, that's that's a really, really important question, and I guess one of the things that.
I think about as well in redrawing the drawings that the state produces in certain
ways is still kind of baulk at the the temporal frameworks that those drawings use,
which is executor lines of development or 20 or 30 year cycles.
And then the question really is how does one inject them into those very same drawings?
Because those drawings are wonderful,
they're wonderful agents that bring together communities as well because they can kind of work across many different groups.
And one of the outcomes, for instance, for the official community of these decadal things is that climate change in the conversation,
in the way that it goes, it becomes also about displacement. And so if you're faced with life or loss of development potential.
So you will have to react to that. That won't be your thing before you can even articulate like, OK, what's going to happen in the next 500 years,
especially if your house is going to get broken down with the model? So where does the law really come in?
And this is why I find the collective set. What are the funicular working in?
Very, very inspiring? Because even if you look at some of the drawings those are opening to look at really rethink what is what is this?
What is the work that these drawings are doing in producing landscapes?
And so, yeah, that's deliberate. And to redraw them and to kind of put them back into circulation in a different way?
Yeah. I could be to want to.
Thank you. That's an excellent question, and the discussion, I think about a lot of things, so I hope it becomes fit coherent.
I think anthropology is quite interesting, as you were saying, mainly because that's when I started this research on climate change a decade ago,
it was more like, But you are an anthropologist, you're not supposed to look at climate change.
That's for natural scientist. And it's shifted a lot until recent years.
And what we can give, I think, is this environmental ethnography,
the lived experience to contextualise and supplement and compliment and criticise these mainstream debates.
What I find is a pushback from the discipline of anthropologists.
When you try to be relevant, then you get reviewers comments that might say, But this isn't anthropological enough.
Maybe you should go to policy audience so kind of policing boundaries so that you're
not even allowed to be relevant if you want to publish in an anthropology journal,
which I think is problematic for the discipline as a whole. But I am really happy that my book is open access.
It's so it's available for anyone in Bangladesh, even though physical copies.
I haven't managed to find a press in Bangladesh yet.
I would have loved to participant in the talk about MLA, for instance, and pandemic has made it harder.
I've had this idea that, you know, I explained my presence there by saying, I'm writing a book and I want to go back and give my interlocutors books.
So I'm not sure when that can happen, but I'm also trying to collaborate with a lot of Bangladeshi researchers self-management.
So it's quite fascinating how it's shifted to acknowledge the fact that this is a shelter belts that we need title over management,
we need to manage siltation. And more of these debates are being voiced by several different types of actors now and environmental networks.
And I'm hoping things change, but I'm not sure how much an academic book helps with that.
So that's always, I think, an issue. But what I was also thinking is there's this really great organisation called E-card,
led by Professor Saleemul Huq, and they're talking about locally led adaptation,
which I think is quite nice because it does bring in the everyday lives and livelihoods
and what local people thinks into these mainstream climate change discourse. I think we are seeing movements and shifts into how this is needed,
and it's slowly happening with an acknowledgement that there is a lot of climate change as a spice going on.
So maybe we should try to figure out what's what are the environmental problems and letting people speak about it themselves.
I don't know if that makes sense of something I want to express.
Thanks. If I could just ask a follow up question to this and something that all of you've sort of touched upon in your in your presentations,
which is the sort of the place of collaboration. So all of you've collaborated with different kinds of actors,
and we've just sort of doctor in response to this question about, you know, speaking to a broader audience.
This and I wondered whether, you know, present projects in the future.
You're thinking of very actively thinking of different forms of dissemination.
And yet you talked about book being open access and you are trying to make it available in Bangladesh.
But I know some of you have other, you know, sort of projects like Nicole have been reading that they to see work and scroll down,
for instance, and that's been really powerful and noted possibly to get it, you know, get the message into the project across, et cetera.
I've been following the Karachi Open Lab sort of reports, et cetera, that you guys put out.
So I just wondered whether, you know, what role does this thing of writing for the audiences or speaking like how does it
feel going in your current projects and what are the things that you've been doing?
I mean, you throw, of course, your beautiful drawings and all all your Instagram. So I see that.
But yeah, it's just I think you could have a chat about that. No shame, would you like to begin if that's the case?
Okay, no, not at all. Thank you for that question, Annika. So the toolkit of and for dissemination is is a big one.
It's a white one, right? And it's becoming more and more innovative and especially in terms of the kinds of media
platforms and apps and different modes of of engagement that have increasingly become available.
And I know that for my colleagues and I, it's a steep learning curve. So.
So one of the ways and we're trying to push ourselves, of course, we sort of remain quite a how shall I put it,
quite bound to the standard conventional toolkit of disseminating through policy briefs, for instance,
if there is a specific kind of project that makes lends itself well to that kind of that form
of dissemination and then really trying as much as possible to disseminate in order to in,
you know, although or there is no I mean, sitting in sind in the province of Synder do is by no means the only language through which people,
you know, engage in and acquire knowledge and disseminate knowledge.
So in Karachi's a cosmopolitan city, and by that I mean proximity to difference, and there are many, many different audiences.
So, you know, so just putting out something in Urdu recently has been a challenge.
So how do we now try and reach out to audiences who speak Pashto to know, you know?
Karachi contains a very expensive and substantial population. Similarly, you know, Burmese Rohingya.
I mean, it's a long list, right? And then also publishing in Sydney. So we're actually sort of grappling with these kinds of things, do we,
when we don't even have the necessary capacity or the capabilities to be able to translate along those lines?
But these are issues that we think about constantly that in order to make our work seem, you know,
to to reach out to wider or wider, wider audiences, the translation factor is a very important one.
So one other way in which we try to we're trying to surmount that is through short films through,
you know, comics is something that we're thinking about it.
Interest work is so inspiring and we've actually been discussing how can we make some of our Heat
project related findings on street vendors actually more available through through the comic medium?
And I don't know. Just I might reach out to you for some advice in the long run or maybe in the short run in which you
might be able to help us because I think that that's the sort of thing that might be quite useful.
And so I think so. It's a wide toolkit. And and as I said, I think it's one that's becoming so innovative and so interesting,
but at the same time requires a very steep learning curve, at least for myself and my colleagues over the Karachi of.
Thanks for watching. Nicolette, and I interrupted you before this.
No, I think with with the work that we did, that didn't happen at sea,
it was it was relentless experimentation and an openness to messing up or or putting up
stuff that's not fully finished because only in the making effort work for the process,
I found it to be a very generative one.
First, in the moment of like thinking with others that that came to produce this work and workshopping work together,
but then also then making that conversation visible and and publicly accessible in terms of the landscape that we put up.
I wish we had the bandwidth to have it out in more language thinking of some of Karachi urban labs, but perhaps a future project.
But at this stage, we were thinking a lot about, you know, what know was having of like both author writing about popular news media and in some ways,
having trying to find ways for that work to enter the planning process on Climate Action Plan, a planning process in which,
like in Chennai, is unexpectedly and momentarily open, even as all the colonial work continues.
Right. So, so,
so trying to find those moments of engagement and trying to exclude them or employed them if you want to a different way of thinking about the 15.
Great, thanks, Nicole. Anybody else like to jump in on this and the dissemination point children, please?
I thank you. Something I think a lot, a lot, actually.
What what comics are doing? And it's comics.
I think they're wonderful because they say,
what did you see putting images and words together to create these parallel narratives that build off of each other?
And the the thing about them is that it's a little paradoxical because on the one hand,
is so what has happened to me is that while I find that drawing comics really does draw in a lot of people,
and that's great as Eskom, you're saying,
there's a lot of explaining I have to do within my own university context to show how this is scholarship and not just about public dissemination.
So kind of cuts both ways. And do so.
Or, like, you know, just everything simplified, the image simplifies it.
And so in some sense,
I think one of the things I tried to do in in my work is to not leave the drawings because then it makes the drawings secondary to the text,
but really a lot of the drawings to just work for themselves.
And it's it's been a learning process because in the moment the if you look at my drawings,
they're all very text heavy and the images still, they work in a certain way.
So what I want to push towards is to kind of break that and hopefully that will actually
help the work circulate even more widely across different disciplinary boundaries.
So it's kind of a process, and it's experimenting with the drawing here.
This is a lot of fun to think about as a way of coming at disseminating things really powerful way to think about dissemination.
Absolutely. I don't think either of you want to add anything.
Yeah, go ahead. Thanks. Thank you for that question.
I think, you know, I just answered or whatever, you know, think with the few few questions that have come up.
So I think and connect them a little bit to Davos question initially about ontologies and ideas, the making of different epistemology and archaeology.
And then I'll connect that dissemination. But you know, the question is very interesting.
So I'm looking at a map show, for instance, that's made by a fisher, but also a map of Saarinen.
And he's defined this whole region of North Chennai through the concept and idea of parties.
But at the same time, it's it's a map that is very specific in terms of his geographies.
It's a map that uses certain very old-school Cartesian techniques, but redefines them in a slightly different kind of way.
Whereas on the other hand, you have someone like Paliwanag who actually has no interest in this Cartesian map,
although they might be from similar ish communities.
And so are different epistemology that are emerging even within many of these sort of counter movements.
Or even I wouldn't be. I don't even know whether I should call them comfortable with because this state is engaging with them now quite closely.
So I don't know how counter it is anymore. So I think it's very interesting to think about, is it possible?
I think that's connected to what Dr Seuss has put up in the chat that.
You know, there is there is this kind of closure between the question of science and so-called indigenous knowledge is happening quite quickly,
and I think and Chitra mentioned that actually the university has to catch up.
So just in terms of dissemination clearly, and Bhavani and I were thinking about this project when we started,
we just didn't imagine this as a monograph for us to give articles,
etc. We had to actually get to that in almost the inverse way where we started to think about,
OK, what do we do with so many different kinds of thoughts?
And epistemology is that, you know, looking at people like Nicole and Chitra really helped us because they were doing really
diverse stuff where they were also able to bring in different kinds of disciplines.
And it's only now that we actually think about how does this translate into academic research, that's been a very interesting process,
but I think that these university spaces need to kind of adjunct to this as well at some point.
Thanks, ED. I think the point you made about the closure between what's called science and its indigenous knowledge and what's what.
I mean, science and goods and indigenous knowledge on what to do and how they sort of overlapping in really interesting ways,
it's one of the most interesting to my mind. Aspects of climate studies of climate climate change work at the moment.
So I think they're that had put that in the in the chat so that there was no me to indicate those comments.
I missed that. Yeah, I'll leave that out in a minute.
Go ahead. No, thank you. Also, in terms of what our future projects might do for dissemination.
So I'm currently on a project looking at ship breaking and the southeast coastal
zone of Bangladesh as part of a larger project on the lifecycle of container ships.
And they're we're thinking of having a museum exhibit,
and a lot of my colleagues are also for their projects doing podcast series seminars series as a way of reaching out.
So being a bit more engaged and I was really inspired by Ogechi and his colleagues work on digitalising maps.
I have so many maps from my time at the British Library that I have no idea what to do with.
I'm not technical or anything, but I was thinking of what my booking would have been so great to layer them.
I have no idea how to do that, so I see a lot of room for collaboration with people who know, you know, like this drawing.
And I think there's a lot we can learn or do together and reaching people or the publics by working together.
And the question from my should I try to respond to that?
I think they have to ask that question. That's okay.
And we can maybe dig that. I just wanted to read out a comment from anybody.
But you said in response to what you will said in response to the next question you,
she says that for those of us in universities would teach young people that one day we can also be pushing move across,
teaching our classes and policy schools, media, schools, etc. outside of the Springfields.
So I'm thinking a lot more of our students as our publics, who are in turn accountable to other publics, plan to go out in the world.
I think that's really important point also given the different academics and we sort of, you know,
have young students of this spoke to things of the commentary and what I was about to ask this question.
I know that they have sort of kind of answered it, but perhaps we can just have go on it and then my I'll come to you after that.
So that one had a question for specifically about that.
Thanks. It is really interesting. I mean, all of these conversations are talking to each other and really making sense.
What I can when something that I just touched upon earlier is, you know,
the whole point about these multiple acknowledges or multiple ways of knowing what practising worked or engaging important.
What I realised is that we have enough understanding about how these ontological polarities have existed across the world in different contexts,
in different settings. What I see is the question that is also being to the earlier discussion around mobilising
a lot of these knowledge is what we see is even now the the the kind of approach is,
is to mobilise them through programmes and policies. And that is where the question of what is epidemiology is done because there
we kind of again engage with some sort of mainstream epistemology as late as,
you know, like the civil society, for example,
there was a difference in attitudes presentation about activist movements and other organisations engaging.
What I see is, and particularly from a broader sector perspective and speaking,
is a lot of them still engage with a very technical scientific approach of universal knowledge of say,
for example, a lot of organisations are developing Work-Life Balance tools or, you know, whatever existing methods and things like that.
And that is something that is taken up through programmes like doctors and usually or not or many other such programmes that don't work.
So that is where the question comes about these spaces for engaging with these knowledge
and how do we kind of bring them to to shape our policies and discourses going forward?
So there is something that I wanted to discuss something more on that aspect.
That's. Thanks. I think they would like to take this idea as a really great question, and I think, you know,
all the panellists probably have something from that, from their own context, that's really valuable and I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts.
I mean, just two quick things. So first, I think.
That there is no getting away in some sense from this techno scientific imagination because it's having such immediate,
fast running sort of impact on on everyday life that there's that there seems to be no getting away from it, which is why I was suggesting that,
you know, the coexistence of these multiple kind of epistemic perspectives of both a different kind of imagination for restaurant space,
possibly, but also one that seriously engages the Cartesian imagination, but pushes that in a slightly different direction.
But the techno scientific imagination that you're talking about is actually taking this.
At least that's what I would argue is taking this perspective quite seriously. You I don't think there is an ignorance, at least from my context.
That's one. The second point, I think, is a much, I suppose, a much more fuzzy one,
which I'm not I'm not 100 percent sure about is, you know, I was quite inspired by people like Matthew again,
Matthew Gandhi, et cetera, who you know or, you know, you can think about Sean Nixon's recent film on on Telluride, where I haven't.
I've only watched bits and pieces of the film. I need to watch the whole thing, but it kind of ties.
There is air pollution to its non-human creatures of black kites.
Why black kites are dropping to the ground. Who cares for these black kites which drop to the ground?
And why is that linked to communal sort of poison?
So I think it's very difficult, in other words, to separate these these ontologies from from one another anymore.
And that's what I'm actually. I'm actually struggling. I not struggling.
I think maybe it's a productive thing that it's as Michael called it, it's kind of a relentless experimentation, right?
And maybe these are the mediums, comics, films, et cetera, which I'm not really skilled in.
So maybe I should now leave the floor often to others.
So why would anybody like to add to what they just said?
No, I think that they're sort of covered it. Thank you for your questions, I would admire if you'd like to please go ahead and ask your question.
Gary, can you hear me? Yes, we can. Yeah, I already typed it in the chad because I didn't know if the mike thing would work,
but yeah, I think it's especially relevant to comedian Ed, but anyone can come in.
I mean, I think it's kind of a general trend right now.
And I mean, it's good in a way that that NGOs and scholars are kind of, yeah,
part as part of this kind of decolonising development and climate change, prioritising local knowledge and kind of community based knowledge.
But I think this kind of reproduces this, this this narrative where where local communities and people are displayed in
this really spatially and temporally static or specific way where you know,
they have per default all these nature based logics.
And it's kind of, yeah, I think and also and this is what I derived also from one of cameleers articles,
is that it might also rub local people's agency because we or, well, kind of,
I guess, development practitioners and stuff like that and only internalise them by way of of the
kind of very sustainable and idealistic logics and knowledge is that they should have.
And thus, whilst it is really these people also have agency in the way that they navigate and shift
between what is what is generally known as scientific knowledge or indigenous knowledge.
And my question, therefore is how in scholarship, but also in policies and in practise, can we move towards a more balanced and more fluid?
Well, in the theme of water, I suppose more fluid understanding of the nuances between what we see as indigenous
knowledge versus scientific knowledge or local knowledge versus local knowledge.
Because, yeah, it is very fluid. And yeah, how can we kind of implement that across across fields and across practises?
I'm sorry that was very rambling, but I hope. I hope it's clear. Thank you.
Thanks, man. Camilla, would you like to jump in?
Thank you, Maya, for that question. I think it's a very important one where we, as scholars should try to, I think,
resist this discourse of a dichotomy between scientific and indigenous knowledges.
And as you mentioned that article, I'm really happy you read it.
It shows code-switching, right? So the same types of knowledges and discourses are contained within the very same person where you
know you have a World Bank project employee talking about embankments as climate change adaptation,
but also knowing that they call siltation and navigating between and having this knowledge right.
And in terms of dissemination, if you talk about the elephant in the room,
which is siltation and embankments, you might get blacklisted, which I go more into depth with in the book.
So I think it's really hard to separate.
These two is indigenous versus scientific knowledge or local versus not local because you also have Westerners.
So Joseph Hanlon has written a great article also about silt and tidal river management and how that's obstructed by donors.
And so it depends on how much you know in this setting in Bangladesh, right?
And it doesn't matter really where you're from. And Jason Collins have also done excellent critiques of such discourses.
So I think it's always going to be hard to resist the narratives of donors and how you're going to do that,
I think, is something that academics have struggled with for a very long time.
And we just have to resist reproducing these stereotypes, I think.
And in terms of decolonising development, that's something I also talk about and that is giving history and context.
You know, these are this is the historical context, like how as research also beautifully shows how this is money factored into Title River,
you know, not just saying that everything is due to sea level rise.
And oh, and this is indigenous knowledge is here. And this is scientific knowledge for showing how this knowledge comes into being
and who are the actors pushing certain types of knowledge is over others,
and I found that James Scott seemed like a state has been extremely useful for a lot of different things,
even the pandemic, you know, with the high modernist ideology,
I think Nickeil also uses that in this work and a checklist of associations because for some reason,
embankments were resisted in the 1990s in Bangladesh when with the flood action plan.
But now they've been able to go had full steam ahead this climate adaptation infrastructure.
And why is that? Is it because that funding actually lets them do canal excavation and repair broken embankments that are needed as roads?
Maybe. I don't know if that responded to your question, Maya.
Thanks coming in the do they want to go ahead and then other day, if you wanted to add anything, they can go ahead.
Yeah, thanks for that question. I think it's a good one.
I think imagination is something separate from scientific knowledge is problematic for all the reasons you point out.
And actually,
there's a longstanding debate around forest conservation and protection around protection of biodiversity in national parks and the like,
where scholars of environmental history and environmental anthropology have shown how the separation between indigenous and scientific knowledge,
the threat of a colonial project.
I recall I to world peace and the divide between indigenous and scientific knowledge as one good example of that critique.
Right. And definitely, you cannot just assume that indigenous people, especially those that are living in cities like, well,
maybe I think more broadly everywhere else as well live outside of the logic of the beings and the becoming of capitalist urban processes, right?
So this is not that of a separation or that these indigenous people are afraid of capitalist.
Fifth, most efficient I work with intimately involved in industrial and urban processes as well.
But it's just to say that there are other ways of sensing, reading and acting in a landscape in a city that are not subsumed by capitalist logics.
For example, right now, I'm thinking of Marisol de la Cadenas work and often got that where she talks about indigenous
residents living in and more than one but less than two works suggesting that there is.
There are other ways of being that fit on and articulate with each other, in particular kinds of mortgage.
So I think that that is kind of true, not just of indigenous people, but I think more broadly for everyone else, including all of us as well.
And it's to make those other ways of sensing, knowing and reading visible, having a conversation with each other in cities that we are working.
Thanks, Nicole. The thing, did your dad anything? No, does anybody else want to jump in that to represent?
Thanks. And also, thank you for his work on indigenous articulation and going to political possibilities, the indigenous dialogues,
because that's a very important thing in the fishing communities because of goalie identity in relation to regional politics.
It's become a very important thing to articulate in order to maintain some kind of security where
land rights and housing and that kind of feeds into right wing politics in very interesting ways.
So in some sense, thinking about the complexities of articulating indigenous identity is also interesting
in a lot of these cases because they may not necessarily always be about the knowledge,
but they could also, in many ways be about the articulation of indigenous identity could also be about actually conforming,
but really going along with development provisions, but for tactical reasons and norms of making sure that displacement doesn't happen.
Single securing livelihood and security because those things take on a sense of urgency,
and that kind of articulation is immediately recognisable and allows for certain kinds of political direction.
So it's really kind of modern. Think about it.
Thanks. Yeah, thanks to Laura. OK.
So we're almost out of time. But I think, Nicole, you had a question if you wanted to go ahead and ask that, and that would be the final question.
Sure, can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you. Right, thank you.
First of all, the panellists for such interesting presentations in the conversation so far,
the kind of thoughts and sharing on locally embedded sources of knowledge just made
me think about our use of the word innovation when speaking about climate change
and especially how that word has is so often now co-opted by these really top down
and high modernist like we just mentioned approaches to addressing climate change.
So I kind of have two interrelated questions. The first being how does our understanding of the term innovation in the conversation
surrounding climate change and South-Asian need to be expanded and redefined?
And also just my body uniquely used in a specific regional context?
And secondly, though, is the use of the word innovation and our current understanding of innovation,
pushing us to ignore locally embedded sources of knowledge.
And is it leading states and just the world in general to favour private sector LED models to create novel solutions to address climate change?
Thank you. Thank you, Nicole.
We would like to. Mick, I can I think you know of.
There is a lot of excitement around thinking about what innovation as a mode of like adapting to and responding to the climate crisis, right?
And I'm here to think of the time that we sort of what was meant by that sort of anticipation
of like techno managerial fantasies to like produce something doesn't quite excited.
And so, you know, one way to respond to it is to critique it, right?
We're talking about how particular kinds of techno managerial fixes are frequently brought into being that recapitulate or harm and really solidify.
Power inequities. But I think what I also do in these in these moments or try to do it at least, is to use the opening challenge,
but innovation to critique and point to the staleness of like high modernist approaches
to respond to the to the climate crisis and to talk about other imaginations
that are in Typekit and all around us as a way to to do things anew on the debris of
on the rubble of like modernist infrastructures and modes of living in the world.
So it's just hard, particularly for Toyota, the way in which it try to respond to that.
But it is a conversation that I like other conversation is participating in with much of these.
For this, you suggest. Thank you, Michael. A machine, please.
Yeah, thank you. So I'm thinking on the innovation point that suddenly in, you know, in the olden studies, an enhanced quality literature,
there's been a conscious effort to to kind of complicate the the innovation aspect by
bringing in new ways of thinking around dynamics and issues of repair and maintenance.
I mean, I point to your work, for instance, and to the work of people like Abdul-Malik, Simon and then a sarcasm bruto and so, so many others.
And also aligning that with, you know, with the sort of literature on care and the body and all of this.
I think it's a very exciting moment. Actually, I certainly do find it in the urban context,
particularly exciting and very thought-provoking that, you know, innovation to guard all of that,
the sort of very romanticisation of of how the poor, the marginalised, the working class sort of,
you know, touch their life together in the face of all kinds of challenges.
So I think that there are these, these new possibilities, these new ways of thinking that take us away from the standard,
more technocratic, more romantic ways of engaging with issues of innovation.
So that, to me, is quite productive, and I certainly do apply that in my own work and I hope to expand on it, for instance, when we think about heat.
So, you know, repairing the body and, you know,
in conversations with epidemiologists and anthropologists and architects, the buildings, the built environment, right,
and the sort of these early nationalities bring up particularly interesting ways to think about to probably imitate innovation,
you know, through the lens of repair and maintenance and care and so forth. So, so yeah, I just wanted to make that point.
Thank you. Interesting, thank you much.
Any money to add to what was just said or if you have any Final Thoughts ideas and to leave us because he's teaching
and I know people over time now and I know Nicholas as a class and other people have lots of stuff going on.
So we should wind up now. But if anybody wanted to put a last thought, final thought, please go ahead.
This is a moment. No.
OK. Well, thank you all so much. This was like, seriously, just absolutely brilliant.
You know, this is like my genes managed to come together on climate change.
I hope we can all meet in a real room and discuss, discuss your amazing work and many of the themes that we picked up.
And there was so many intersecting interesting points, and I'd love to be able to, you know,
flesh them out a bit more so hopefully in a more intense workshop at some point in the future.
So thank you so much, Professor Unburnt Chithra Nicole Media.
Thank you all for being here. They are in absentia. Thank you. Thank you all for the great questions and thank you for being there today.
This is going to be this has been recorded, so we will be putting it up on our website so you can hopefully have,
you know, if you missed something, you can come back to it here. Great.
OK, but everybody have a good day here. Good night wherever you are. Thank you, everyone.
Thank you. Bye bye.