Curating hope for Kolkata’s infraculture using ‘ethno-graphy'
Jenia Mukherjee (IIT Kharagpur, India)
Cities are ‘living systems infrastructure’ assimilating technological apparatuses, social arrangements, and more-than-human enactments along multiple temporalities. However, that cities and environment are not anti-thetical to each other is a recent acknowledgement in urban studies focusing on city-nature intersections and ‘sustainable flows’. Sustainable Development Goal 11 on ‘safe and sustainable cities’ has a dedicated indicator towards safeguarding and protecting nature and culture (11.4). The megalopolitan city of Kolkata buzzing with 14.38 million people (census 2011) is encircled by 12,500 hectares of wetlands in the east that recycles around 750 million liters of effluent and generates 22 tons of fish per day, catering to social livelihoods. Pisciculture is conducted through low-cost folk technology and situated cultural practices along intergenerational transmission of knowledge. Combining critical peri/urban infrastructural studies with environmental humanities perspectives, this presentation will discuss ‘ethno-graphy’ an immersive-interactive tool integrating qualitative research with visualization techniques to capture and curate hopeful transitions for Kolkata’s infraculture, through academia-practitioner collaborations and collective actions.
Bionote
Jenia is a transdisciplinary researcher focusing on social resilience of communities inhabiting coastal-estuarine landscapes. She is the author of Blue Infrastructures (Springer Nature, 2020) that demonstrates social biography of canals and wetlands system of Kolkata. She is one of the core coordinators of the Global Center of Spatial Methods for Urban Sustainability which is one of 12 Excellence Centers for Exchange and Development (exceed), funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) via the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). She is currently leading five large-scale global partnership projects on coastal livelihoods and viability. She is also involved in the setting up of a ‘real world lab’ in the Kumirmari island village of the Indian Sundarbans as part of SOR4D ENGAGE project.
Date:
January 8, 2025
17:45-19:15
Venue:
Global South Studies Center
University of Cologne
S 253
Classen-Kappelmann-Strasse 24, 50931 Köln
Organized by the Thematic Area Infrastuctures