I had the opportunity to participate in the Symposium titled “Material as Method: New Histories of the Built Environment” at the Annual Conference on South Asia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in October 2023. Many thanks to Ateya Khorakiwala (Columbia University) & Curt Gambetta (Dartmouth College) for organizing and facilitating the same. Please find the Symposium details below.

Material as Method: New Histories of the Built Environment
Organizers: Ateya Khorakiwala (Columbia University) & Curt Gambetta (Dartmouth College)

Assembly Room, Floor 1

Schedule
8:30 – 9:00 AM Introductions and Thematic Overview
Curt Gambetta (Dartmouth College) and Ateya Khorakiwala (Columbia University)

9:00 – 10:15 AM Panel 1: Material Boundaries
Thomas Oommenn (UC Berkeley)
Reading the Monsoon: Laterite, Aluminum and Oceanic Histories of the Local

Dwight Carey (Amherst College)
Microscopic Interconnections: The Building Materials That Tie India, Mauritius, and Africa Together

Arijit Chatterjee (Washington University, Steedman Fellow) and Asha Sumra (Aarhus School of Architecture)
Cartographies of Clay

Farhan Karim (University of Kansas)
Title TBA

10:30 AM – 12:15 PM Panel 2.: Materials and Institutions
Priya Jain (Texas A&M University)
Indian Research on Black Cotton Soil and Afro-Asian Solidarity Amidst the Cold War

Ateya Khorakiwala (Columbia University)
Surkhi and the Failures of Indigenous Postcolonial Modern Materiality

Siddharth Menon (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
M-Sand, River Sand, and the Extended Political Ecology of Urbanization in India

Anirudh Gurumoorthy (UCLA)
Speculating Spaces and Acclimatization Species: Emplacing the Hevea brasiliensis, 1876- 1906

1:45 – 3:30 PM Panel 3: Material Labors
Priya Joseph (Christ University, Bangalore)
Earth Polemics: Labour, Land and Capitalistic Interpretations of Built Environment in India

Yashada Wagle (UCLA)
Making the Mill Move: The Case of the Oriental Spinning and Weaving Company, Bombay, 1855

Curt Gambetta (Dartmouth College)
The Energopolitics of Labor-Intensive Building Materials

Rachel Sturman (Bowdoin College)
Material Proximities: Possibility, Harm, and Indifference in Construction Labor

3:45 – 5:30 PM Roundtable
Discussant: Namita Dharia (Rhode Island School of Design)
Moderators: Curt Gambetta (Dartmouth College) and Ateya Khorakiwala (Columbia University)

6:00 PM Dinner and drinks