MOSPUS seminar: Dushkaal Temporalities: Reframing Time, Space and Loss in Planning for the Climate Crisis

From their vantage point on the frontlines of disaster, Indigenous fishers from Mumbai frame the fishing crisis they sense unfolding as also a climate crisis, one that’s long in the making. They articulate this slow disaster as matsya dushkaal (fish drought). By blurring the line between the everyday and the eventful disaster, dushkaal contests the reductive, event-based, crisis-planning approach of the government. Situated in Mumbai’s wet margins, it makes claims to reframe the temporality of the climate crisis and better apprehend the losses it causes. By learning from the time of long dyings that fishers are living in intimate relation with, how might we plan differently for this crisis?

Lalitha Kamath is a Professor at the Centre for Urban Policy and Governance at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. Mumbai. Her research interests centre on urbanisation, urban governance and planning, urban politics and informality. She has also engaged with questions of public participation and citizen collective action. The talk draws on long-term ethnographic work with fishing communities on Mumbai’s east coast to understand changing conceptions of urban climates, habitation, labour and value at the water’s edge.

Registration
All welcome, no need to register. For more information, please write to dpinder@ruc.dk 

The seminar is organised by MOSPUS, a research group in the Department of People and Technology that focuses on Space, Place, Mobility and Urban Studies.