STS Speaker. ToxiCity: Practices of Living Anthropogenic Seas

How might we think about and address the kinds of life that emerge in the wastescapes of cities? In this talk I attend to the social and natural life of Mumbai’s anthropogenic sea. Today, Mumbai’s sea is an uneasy gathering of urban, climactic and agrarian processes. As sewage, fish, birds, coral, and algae interact in dynamic relations, how are fishers, amateur naturalists and scientists negotiating the ambivalent ecologies of the Anthroposea. By attending to their practices, this talk explores emergent ways of thinking, knowing and acting in muddy waters.

Bio: Nikhil Anand is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the political ecology of cities, read through the different lives of water. His award winning book, Hydraulic City, focuses on the everyday ways in which cities and citizens are made through the everyday management of water infrastructure in Mumbai. With Hannah Appel and Akhil Gupta, Dr. Anand is also co-editor of The Promise of Infrastructure, which focuses on how infrastructure provides a generative ground to theorize time and politics. Dr. Anand's new research project, The Urban Sea, attends to the ways coastal cities are actively constituted through social and natural relationships with the sea. Dr. Anand has a Masters in Environmental Science from Yale University and a PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University