Where are you situated as COVID-19 plays out? What backstories shape your engagement with COVID-19? How can you be contacted? What questions and settings are you especially interested in following?

I am a PhD student in Cultural Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. I am presently sheltering in place in the Irvine for the COVID-19 pandemic. My attachments extend to urban south Asia, specifically Delhi, where I grew up and from where a migrant exodus is underway. I have attempted to understand air pollution governance in Delhi, particularly the types of expertise harnessed to provide explanations of causalities, uncertainties, and strategies. One persistent concern is who is left out conceptually and materially from such explanations, and how histories of urban planning and environmental advocacy contribute to this process. A major portion of this ethnographic work is archived and analysed at the The Asthma Files platform, where I continue to be a collaborator. I am also involved in the ongoing Visualizing Toxic Places project, and have previously participated in the New Orleans Field Campus in 2019. Currently, my research interests involve understanding articulations of citizenship, religion, and (trans)nationalisms that emerge from studying environmental scientific and advocacy communities. 

The questions I am interested in following:

(1) How, in different settings, have dominant political regimes and ideologies shaped COVID-19 preparation and response? 

(2) In a particular setting, what organizations -- governmental, commercial, religious, activist -- have been involved (through action or inaction) in COVID-19 response?  How are these organizations coordinating among themselves? Which organizations have the most cultural authority and political power? 

(3) How is COVID-19 knowledge and expertise moving across national borders? 

(4) How are different ecologies implicated in COVID-19?  

(5) What capacities are there (in different settings) to question how COVID-19 knowledge, management and care are taking shape?

I can be contacted at [email protected]

I am a Ph.D. student in Cultural Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. My email is [email protected].

I have been working on a series of projects that could intersect with the COVID-19 work (running on Disaster STS Network or other PECE instances):

• Quotidian Anthropocenes – uses a similarr cross-scalar analytics and place focus
• Visualizing Toxic Place – could help to analyze and create ethnographically rich COVID-19 visuals
• Environmental Injustice – could be supplemented with COVID-19 disaster case studies (beyond its current focus on California) and other teaching interventions that

I also edit the monthly newsletter for the PECE platform, which can be used to feature COVID-19 project content. You can sign up here to receive the newspaper. 

Cutting across the COVID-19 project (and the others above) is my interest in "archiving for the Anthropocene." I ask what kind of new knowledge and data infrastructures that is necessary to support civic capacity in different places. I currently focus on sites of the Quotidian Anthropocene project, including Taiwan, Germany and Turkey.