Environment, climate change, coasts; science and technology studies, drawing, technical images; comics, graphic arts, visual communication; weather, disaster, infrastructure; plants, animals, and insects

My first book, Drawing Coastlines: Climate Anxieties and the Visual Reinvention of Mumbai's Shore (working title, forthcoming with Cornell University Press) is an ethnographic account of how technoscientific images create coasts and coastal futures. It follows surveyors, planners, fishing communities, amateur meteorologists, and marine life advocates, and the maps, plans, infographics, statistical figures, and visual archives they create in the city of Mumbai. The book moves between comics and text to show how drawings and drawing practices create coasts whose futures are foreshortened and given over to development. Moving between images and texts, Drawing Coastlines deconstructs and reconstructs scientific images and the technologies, practices, and choices that go into making them, as well as the ways in which they are seen, performed, and manifest. In so doing, it tries to find openings for drawing differently and, in through the act of drawing, forging forms of care in a time of crisis.

In my future work, I hope to continue studying human-environmental relationships. I am currently interested in the burgeoning insect industries and the human-insect relationships that emerge from the management regimes that structure them. I also hope to continue working with the visual arts, not just as a means of expanding channels of research communication, but as a means to think, work, and arrive at concepts.

I have an undergraduate degree in architecture and a graduate degree in visual communication, where I specialized in illustration and experimental animation. These programs cultivated my abiding interest in visual story-telling, especially stories about the changing environment and the sciences of studying it, and the changing worlds of plants, animals, and insects. 

My graduate studies in anthropology provided the tools for bringing drawing together with my research interests and I began doing fieldwork in low-income housing schemes in Mumbai, India. In 2011, the Indian government released a new policy for the coast, which opened up Mumbai's coastal lands for development. Over the many months of fieldwork, I began piecing together the ways in which fish, water, garbage, and urban infrastructure were tied together - particularly through technical drawings, which are vital to putting in place coastal management regimes. At the same time, there were many different community-led mapping and planning projects as well. Each of these drawings created a different coast and a different coastal future.

I followed different groups and their visual projects: government surveyors, fishing communities, marine-life advocates, and architects. I the process, I began studying how ideas key to environmental management and urban planning, namely, objectivity, transparency, and accuracy were not technical givens, but produced through drawing practices.

Given the ways in which drawings materialise worlds, I am interested in thinking using ethnographic research to draw differently, i.e., in ways that respond to the ongoing climate crisis. This is an ongoing concern that informs my research trajectory.