The Department of Sociology invites you to a talk titled ‘Ethics and Place-making: The building of Annabhau Sathe Nagar’ by Dr. Shireen Mirza, Assistant Professor, School of Development, Azim Premji University. Part of the Sociology Thursday Seminar Series, the virtual talk is scheduled on 27 October at 12:00 PM IST.
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Abstract: This talk describes a politics of place-making grounded in the critique of the past as a counterclaim to established social norms. In narratives of the Matang community, who describe how they built Annabhau Sathe Nagar by reclaiming marshes around the Deonar landfill with waste, the symbolic can be seen to produce urban space. Place-making is grounded in a Dalit critique of the past, in which the historical and mythological are fused in a re-reading of history through a Marxist lens as well as an inflection of anti-brahmanical Bhakti traditions. How does this critique of the past constitute a spatial politics that is common to marginal Dalit and Muslim groups? How are self-empowering community narratives connected to creating neighbourhoods and building cities, such that the basis of its foundation is imagined by heretical saints, antinomian figures, and an ethics of manual labour as the sole truth? How can this critique be understood, particularly in ways it fuses the mythical with the historical as a tangible practice of place-making?
About the speaker: Dr. Shireen Mirza is currently an Assistant Professor at the School of Development at Azim Premji University. Previously she taught at Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology-Delhi, Ambedkar University (Delhi) and at the Department of Humanities & Social Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology Madras. She obtained her PhD in Anthropology and Sociology from the School of Oriental and African Studies in 2011. Her areas of interest are urban anthropology, ecology, religion, waste, anthropocene;, science, technology & society. Her most publications in 2021 'Stigma and Caste Labour: Understanding contemporary practices of discrimination and ‘othering’ Global Dialogues, Ed Sujata Patel; 'Politics of Waste and Social Inequalities in Indian Cities' in Oxford Bibliographies in 2020 as well as in 2019 include ‘Becoming Waste: Three moments in the Life of Landfills in Mumbai city' in Economic and Political Weekly RUA special issue on 'Waste and Pollution', edited by Amita Baviskar and Vinay Gidwani. She has also published in Contributions to Indian Sociology, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society and several other peer reviewed journals. Her book nearing completion is titled 'Stigma and the City: Dalit Muslim Theologies and Placemaking'.