Shweta Rani, Faculty Teaching Associate at the Centre of Writing and Pedagogy (CWP), Krea University will deliver an invited talk titled Khula Area: On the Urban and the Pathological, as part of the CSH-CPR Urban Workshop series, organised by the Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH) and the Centre for Policy Research (CPR), on 26 March, 2024.
About talk: Pathology is one of the key factors that informs and structures urban spaces. To explore the relationship between the urban and the pathological, this talk trails the Aedes mosquito, the dengue vector, to trace the intersection of civic, social, ecological, and political in the everyday life of Delhi. Since 1996, the Indian capital city has faced almost a yearly outbreak of dengue, a mosquito-borne viral infection. To control the possibility of yet another dengue epidemic, the gaze of public health authorities primarily focuses on the areas considered inherently ‘dirty’- localities of East Delhi at the margin of the city, situated at Yamuna riverfront, populated by working-class migrants living in the unauthorised colonies. The residents of such areas have to deal with the absence of basic urban infrastructure while also being under the stringent administrative glare for pest control.
Picking up on the usage of the colloquial expression ‘khula area’ by inhabitants of these areas and their administrators to express the ungovernable stubbornness of such regions, this ethnographic shows that while the state works to localise the pathological, it remains fuzzy and deterritorialised. By analysing narratives around the ‘Khula Area’ this work explores how a city is imagined, inhabited, and governed through the prism of the pathological and all things that fall within its shadow.
Register for the Zoom meeting here.
