Join us for a panel discussion of V. Chitra's new book, Drawing Coastlines.  In this book, V. Chitra reveals the ways that technical images such as weather infographics, sea-level projections, and surveys are fast remaking Mumbai's coasts and coastal futures. They set in place infrastructural interventions, vocabularies of development and conservation, and their lines and dots inscribe material conditions of existence and horizons of loss that entangle life forms.

V. Chitra interlaces graphics and text by redrawing scientific images, the moments of their construction, the choices and consequences of what gets drawn and what does not, and how images are seen, performed, and manifest. These visual reconstructions show how images remake human-nonhuman relationships, arrange urban politics, and materialize landscapes in complex and contradictory ways. The multimodal format of Drawing Coastlines engages in the politics of its context where words and images combine to create coastal worlds, and to find, through a creative anthropology, openings to build new forms of care in the midst of crisis.

Speakers:

V. Chitra is a Lecturer in Anthropology in ANU’s School of Archaeology and Anthropology. In addition to a PhD in anthropology, Chitra has an undergraduate degree in architecture and a graduate degree in visual communication, where she specialized in illustration and experimental animation. These programs cultivated her 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. She has recently embarked upon a new research project exploring burgeoning insect industries and the human-insect relationships that emerge from the management regimes that structure them. In this new project, she hopes 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.

Anna-Sophie Jurgens is a Senior Lecturer in Science Communication at the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science at The Australian National University (ANU) and the Head of the Popsicule, ANU’s Science in Pop Culture and Entertainment Hub. Her research explores the cultural meanings of science, the history of (violent) clowns and mad scientists, science and humor, and the interface between science and (public) art.

Assa Dorron teaches anthropology and Asian Studies in the School of Culture, History and Language at the ANU.

Caroline Schuster is Associate Professor of Anthropology in ANU’s School of Archaeology and Anthropology.She is author of the collaborative graphic ethnography, Forecasts: a story of weather and finance at the edge of disaster (University of Toronto Press, 2023). Forecasts draws connections between farmers facing drought in northern Paraguay all the way to the global reinsurance industry and international development policy.