Bodies, Cities, Ecologies

Course Brief 

The course was about understanding how indigeneity, caste, religion and gender as categories that inscribe bodies with difference intersect to shape everyday life in city spaces. How do they produce forms of city spaces and ecologies where such life unfolds? How do spatial practices make life durable (or not) in such city spaces and ecologies? How can such diversely situated spatial practices from diverse cities of the Global South be put into conversation with one another?  With these questions, we tried to articulate our own thoughts and practices on engaging difference with and beyond the registers of discrimination, segregation, and splintering through which the realities of Southern cities are widely sketched as a chronic present.

In this course, we walked in through mangroves and forests, town planning schemes and cooperative housing societies. These are neighbourhoods inhabited by dalits and adivasis, agris and kolis, jains and marwaris, and sindhis and punjabis. 

We read  the  excerpts from dalit, indigenous, decolonial and feminist writings which helped us reflect on our encounters with bodies, spaces and ecologies in the form of postcards, specifically picture postcards. Upturning the conventional colonial thinking by employing postcards, a medium historically utilized by them as well.