Nikhil Anand
Associate Professor of Anthropology,
University of Pennsylvania
Nikhil is an urban and environmental anthropologist, focusing on cities, infrastructure and climate change. His award-winning book, Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Politics in Mumbai (Duke University Press 2017), examines how cities and citizens are made through the everyday management of water infrastructure. His second book, The Promise of Infrastructure (co-edited with Hannah Appel and Akhil Gupta, Duke 2018), explores how infrastructures are generative sites to theorize time, politics and the future. Nikhil’s new book project, Urban Sea, rethinks the city from climate changed seas, by attending to the work of coastal fishers, scientists and planners working in Mumbai’s wetscapes.
Anuradha Mathur
Professor of Landscape Architecture,
Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania
Anuradha Mathur, an architect and landscape architect, is a Professor at Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Her work has focused on how water is visualized and engaged in ways that lead to conditions of its excess and scarcity, but also opportunities that its ubiquity offers for new visualizations of place, and resilience through design. She is author with Dilip da Cunha of Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape (2001); Deccan Traverses: The Making of Bangalore's Terrain (2006); Soak: Mumbai in an Estuary (2009) and co-editors of Design in the Terrain of Water (2014). These books accompanied major public exhibitions that form an intrinsic part of Mathur and da Cunha’s practice.
Dilip da Cunha
Adjunct Professor, GSAPP, Columbia University
Dilip da Cunha, an architect and planner is Adjunct Professor at the GSAPP, Columbia University. He is recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2020. He is author with Anuradha Mathur of Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape (2001); Deccan Traverses: The Making of Bangalore's Terrain (2006); Soak: Mumbai in an Estuary (2009) and co-editors of Design in the Terrain of Water (2014). Da Cunha is also author of a new book, The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent, (2019). The book draws attention to rivers as a consequence of one of the most fundamental acts in the design of human habitation, namely, the separation of land from water.
Rhea Shah
Research Associate,
University of Pennsylvania
Rhea Shah is a transdisciplinary environmental designer who believes design should be a cultural manifestation of ecological processes. She is concerned with the pursuit of beauty by dissolving the culturally imagined boundaries between built and unbuilt, human and other-than-human, organism and environment. She is an architect trained at the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute of Architecture and Environmental Studies in Mumbai and has a Masters in Landscape Architecture from the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University. For the Inhabited Sea Project Rhea was a Research Associate at Penn working with Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha. She has previously worked in graphic design, animation, film curation and as an architect, design researcher and instructor. She enjoys all tactile explorations and journeys of curiosity and most prefers conversing through drawing and food.
Lalitha Kamath
Associate Professor, School of Habitat Studies,
Tata Institute of Social Sciences
Lalitha Kamath is an urbanist who teaches at the School of Habitat Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. Trained as an urban planner, her first book was a co-edited volume that focused on a critical exploration of emerging discourses and practices of “citizen participation” that have become part of urban governance reforms and infrastructure projects in India. Subsequent work has focused on the violence of property urbanism in the global south and its dispossession on racial, ethnic, class, and gender lines, but also the bottom-up agency of marginalised groups in unsettling dominant urbanisms. As part of this work, she is engaged in ethnographic study of an aboriginal fishing community on Mumbai’s east coast to understand changing conceptions of habitation and value at the water’s edge.
Gopal Dubey
PhD Student,
Tata Institute of Social Sciences
Gopal is currently pursuing a PhD from TISS along with his engagement with research initiatives. After graduating in information technology, Gopal pursued humanities research, exploring contemporary issues in both rural and urban settings related to forest, land, water, migration, labour and settlement issues with grass-root organisations, NGOs, and academic institutions. He is currently interested in the ‘in-between’ of the rural-urban binary.
Rohit Mujumdar
Assistant Professor,
School of Environment and Architecture (SEA)
Rohit is an architect and a planner whose research on cities focuses at the intersections of economic networks, difference, law, communicative and collaborative action and storytelling. He is currently researching the spatial and environmental politics of a refugee city on Mumbai’s periphery based on copy culture economies and emerging contexts of urbanization and housing in eight second cities across South India. His earlier research has focused on the spatial and cultural politics of collaborative action in establishing Special Economic Zones in Maharashtra. As a part of the Inhabited Seas project, he is studying a wide range of household experiences and responses to wetness in suburban Mumbai.
Vastavikta Bhagat
Assistant Professor,
School of Environment and Architecture (SEA)
Vastavikta is an architect focusing on the spatial and environmental politics surrounding post-intensive mining landscapes and climate change in Indian cities. She is currently researching a wide range of household experiences and responses to wetness in suburban Mumbai. Drawing on a year long Research Associateship at SEA (2018), she is concurrently developing a graphic novel and journal article manuscript on the contestations surrounding the futures of Goa’s mining landscapes. She was a Field Stations 2019 Fellow under the Wright Ingraham Institute in Colombia and has worked earlier with Anupama Kundoo Architects, Ratan Batiliboi Consultants, KRVIA-Design Cell and Ranjit Sinh Architects.
Shreya Kothawale
Research Assistant,
School of Environment and Architecture (SEA)
Shreya is an architect whose research interests lie in gender studies and the role of architecture in conflict-zones. She is currently researching a wide range of household experiences and responses to wetness in suburban Mumbai. She has been invited by the UNhabitat to present her design proposal to build public sanitation infrastructure for Trans-communities and by the N-core Foundation for ‘Water for the informals’ in Mumbai. She recently presented a paper at the Gender and Academic Leadership in Architecture in India Symposium. She has worked with MASHAL to design a rehabilitation project at a disaster prone site in Pune.
D. Parthasarathy
Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences,
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
D. Parthasarathy is the India Value Fund Chair Professor of Sociology at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He is also Convener of the interdisciplinary program in Climate Change at IIT Bombay. He is the author of Collective Violence in a Provincial City (1997) and has co-edited “Women’s Self Help Groups: Restructuring Socio-Economic Development,” (2011) and “Cleavage, Connection and Conflict in Rural, Urban and Contemporary Asia” (2013). His current research interests include urban commons, transnational urbanism, gender, development, violence, legal pluralism and resource governance, and vulnerability to climate / disaster risks.
Arun Inamdar
Professor, Centre of Studies in Resources Engineering,
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
Arun B. Inamdar completed his Masters in Applied Geology in 1976 and Ph.D. in Geology in 1986 from IIT Bombay and initially worked on Remote Sensing applications to mineral exploration as well as mine environment. His current interests revolve around applications of Remote Sensing and GIS to various aspects of Coastal and Marine environment. Specific areas of interest include water quality monitoring, wetlands conservation, coastal vulnerability, climate change impacts and Integrated Coastal Management (ICM).
P. Pallavi
PhD Student, Interdisciplinary Program on Climate Studies,
IIT Bombay
Pallavi is a PhD student in Interdisciplinary program on Climate studies, IIT Bombay. She is currently researching/ assessing the socio-ecological vulnerability from climate change in the coastal areas. Pallavi has a masters’ in Environmental Sciences from JNU, New Delhi where her dissertation was on Haze detection through Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) over Indo- Gangetic plains, and a Bachelors in Chemistry honors from Utkal University, Bhubaneswar. She currently holds a junior research fellowship (JRF) from the University Grants Commission (UGC).
Helen White
Professor of Chemistry and Environmental Studies,
Haverford College
Helen is a chemical oceanographer, focusing on the persistence of human-derived compounds in the marine environment. She is interested in how chemical compounds associated oil and plastic debris are transported in the environment. In collaboration with Dr. Anna Michel, Helen is developing field-based techniques to rapidly detect and characterize oil residues and plastic debris in coastal environments. Helen’s research has been supported by funding from the National Science Foundation, the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Foundation, the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine Gulf Research Program, and the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation.
Courtney Daub
Undergraduate student, Anthropology,
University of Pennsylvania
Courtney is a senior at the University of Pennsylvania studying cultural anthropology. Throughout her undergraduate career she has participated in collaborative ethnographic and archival research projects in Jamaica and India relating to a wide range of interests, including postcolonial state formation, political economies of scientific research, space, labor and gender, sexuality and race. Her time at Penn has encouraged her to think about the possibilities and limitations of ethnographic inquiry, in its broadest conception, to articulate futures in a world that climate change, and its related processes, renders unstable.
Adwaita Banerjee
PhD Student, Anthropology,
University of Pennsylvania
Adwaita likes to interrogate urban spaces as meshworks of capital and densities. He has worked with civil society organisations over the last five years on the issues of cultural rights, knowledge systems and data democratisation. Prior to starting his PhD at Penn he has worked on thematics that focused on forms of urban marginalisations, informality and habitat in Mumbai, India. As part of his doctoral thesis he is looking at the flows of plastic as material within the city. His general interest lies in looking at connections of the material and social within urban communities.
Siddharth Chitalia
Recent Architecture Graduate
School of Environment and Architecture
Siddharth’s general interest lies in ‘urban social design’ for which he likes to investigate networks and understand the ecosystems and dynamics of a given social environment. For his undergraduate thesis at SEA he has observed streetscapes of Mumbai closely to understand the relationship between spatiality of public spaces and the behaviours of people inhabiting them. His time at SEA has encouraged him to study wetlands and think about urban designs, policies, and regulations in the context of rising flood levels in Mumbai. He has also worked as junior architect at Mad(e) in Mumbai for designing public amenities and sanitation facilities in India.
Ellie Kerns
Undergraduate Student
Environmental Studies, Haverford College
Ellie is a junior Environmental Studies major with minors in Statistics and Fine Arts. Ellie has been working to analyze and identify plastic samples collected from a wide range of coastal marine environments. Ellie is interested in understanding and generating inter-disciplinary narratives of how plastics are transported through different environments.
Zulekha Sayyed
Independent Filmmaker
CAMP
Zulekha is an independent filmmaker. She has worked as part of the Community Video Unit with Yuva, an NGO, focusing on raising and solving the issues of her own neighbourhood — Parksite in Vikhroli — a suburb of Mumbai. Her community resides in the slums, right in the centre of an upcoming suburb in the ever-expanding Mumbai and therefore are seen as a ‘problem’. The re-developers, along with officials of the city, are trying to make Parksite ‘slum-free’ in lieu of assimilating communities through better public facilities. She has worked with CAMP studio over the last 3 years.
Shaunak Modi
Marine Life of Mumbai
Co-Founder, Coastal Conservation Foundation
Shaunak is part of the core team at Marine Life of Mumbai and the co-founder of Coastal Conservation Foundation. Part of the first marine stranding response programme in Maharashtra, he has worked both with citizens and authorities, and has been instrumental in bringing awareness about the intertidal zone, and its inhabitants. He is interested in citizen science and identifying data-driven wildlife conservation solutions and is a vital contributor to urban data collection and outreach. His other life includes creating and enabling websites for organisations. He has previously worked in the wilderness travel space where he founded his own company, Naturenama.
Sejal Mehta
Editor and Head of Outreach,
Marine Life of Mumbai
Sejal Mehta is a writer/editor and has been part of the publishing landscape for 17 years. Her writing navigates travel, science communication, natural history, wildlife and communities, for various newspapers and magazines. She has been part of the senior editorial teams at Lonely Planet Magazine India, National Geographic Traveller India, Nature inFocus and is currently Editor/ head of outreach at Marine Life of Mumbai, a citizen-led project of Coastal Conservation Foundation. She is a published author (fiction and children's books) and sketches about wildlife at Snaggletooth, a line of nature-inspired merchandise.
CAMP
CAMP (set up in 2007) is a collaborative studio based in Chuim Village, Mumbai. CAMPs interests lie in thresholds of authority and property, and questions of infrastructure and distribution. Their artistic practice is characterised by hands-on technological experimentation and new forms of spatial and historical exploration. CAMP's long-term projects include the online archives pad.ma and indiancine.ma; (please retain links) Wharfage, a five-year project in the Western Indian Ocean; ROADS, a five-year research project on roads in South Asia with a group of anthropologists; R and R, a space located in an urban resettlement colony; among other gatherings and inventions that are hosted at their rooftop studio. Their works have exhibited worldwide. More at: https://studio.camp/shortguide/
R + R
R and R is a centre for artistic and intellectual activity located amid the "Resettlement and Rehabilitation" colonies of Lallubhai Compound. It opened in 2016 and was initiated by CAMP, Khanabadosh, Prasad Shetty and Rupali Gupte in collaboration with Sindhu Housing Society (Building no. 21), Lallubhai Compound, Mankhurd.