My paper considers technical images that remake human-nature relationships along urban shores. They produce particular kinds of coastal futures through their modes of drawing humans, animals, plants, and matter. They are also drawings that erase relationships for the benefit of developmental goals and extractive regimes. Technical drawings are sites where deep environmental futures and forms of life are suspended or denied: they intensify the risk of displacement for coast-dwellers, while other forms, species, or terrains of encounter are struck out altogether. Based on ethnographic research within Mumbai’s fisher communities, my paper asks how we might draw coasts that are otherwise. I would also like to use this as a springboard for thinking about the relationship between drawing and anthropology in the context of the climate crisis.

V. Chitra is an anthropologist and her work intersects environmental anthropology, science and technology studies, and visual studies. She has a Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University and was a postdoctoral scholar at the Mittal South Asia Institute at Harvard. Chitra has a background in design and works with comics as a medium for conducting and communicating research.

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