Commentary on “A Future History of Water” by Andrea Ballestero

“And yet, the tension between these two logics is not necessarily a mis- match between two incompatible philosophies of value. For Sofia, it was more like a puzzle that challenged her and her colleagues to arrange their numbers appropriately, calculate them ethically, and organize them harmoniously. These are two different flows of ideas and preoccupations that coexist inseparably. Sofia’s job consists of giving the tension arising from their coexistence the right intensity so that their prices can stand an ethicality test, an assessment of how they will affect the lives of others.”

commentaries, Book ForumBorderlines CSSAAMEMay 23, 2022

Protest, Politics, and Panjab

“At the level of historical analysis, there is a long history of conflict… For “ruler” and “ruled” within Panjab, much of the literature, poetry, and aphorisms point to widespread irreverence and even contempt of common people toward authority. This resonates through Sikhi and its philosophy of empowering the most exploited and excluded to confront their oppressors. Even at a broader level, it is not merely a colonialist fantasy to acknowledge that the legitimacy of rulers in Panjab and its environs was quite precarious.”

Conversations, commentariesBorderlines CSSAAMEFebruary 14, 2021

Shelter as Capital: The City as Prison/The Housing Question in Egypt

But if a prison is like a city can we say that the reverse is also true? Can we ask in what ways cities are like prisons? What precisely would we able to see we saw the city not as the symbol or “crucible” of modern mobility – as in dominant strands of social theory since at least Adam Smith – but instead as a site meant to render immobile and stuck in place the masses of people cities now house?

commentaries, Book ForumBorderlines CSSAAMENovember 19, 2020

Subaltern Urbanism I: Bringing Forth a Capacious Reading for Universal Justice

In this collage-essay, Josué David Chávez uses data visualization technology to ‘map’ R.B. Moré's recently translated memoirs. By using the text Chavez attempts to visualize possible acts of imagination by Moré as he traversed the chawls of Bombay. Chavez asks how these visuals could have provided Moré with a way to recognize injustices that needed redress but existed beyond the field of legibility for existing models of identity-based justice [cover image: RB More (far left, standing) with his wife, Sitabai, and family. Photo courtesy of Subodh More].

commentaries, EssaysBorderlines CSSAAMEJune 19, 2020Ambedkar Initiative

Refusal, Romanticism and Ground Realities in Northeast India

Suraj Gogoi interrogates the tension between ‘theory’ and ‘ground realities’ in writing on the completed yet contested NRC process in India’s North-Eastern state of Assam. Gogoi writes, “the intent of the article is two-fold. First, the article seeks to uncover the ecology of academic work on the background of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) process in contemporary Assam, which aims to identify 'illegal' citizens in the Northeast Indian state…Secondly… the various grounds of such critique —underground, overground, background, foreground, groundlessness—will also be explored.”