Dr Dhiren Borisa
Funding period: 1 May 2024 – 31 December 2024
Type of funding:
Other Grants
This grant was awarded as a follow-up to Using Sex as an Archive of the city: New Insights into understanding Urban sexual Geographies from Global South Perspective.
Making Cities Liveable: Caste, Queerness and City-making through stories of everyday resilience in India is a collaboration of Dr Borisa with Prateek Draik, Rishabh Arora, and Dhrubo Jyoti along with Project Mukti.
The project wonders, “How to tell stories of our cities?” According to the team, messy lives and practices draw our messy geographies. Mapping through the intersections of queerness, caste, and urban making, Making Cities Liveable intends to work with around 12-15 Dalit queer, activists, artists, scholars, and city dwellers. The team will brainstorm together more creative ways of undoing the constrained disciplinary frames to develop more life-enhancing, interdisciplinary ways of approaching urban studies by channelizing radical queer, feminist and decolonial methodologies. For them, the project aims to co-create a zine of auto-ethnographic story telling which can be shared with community organizers and activists.
Making Cities Liveable: Caste, Queerness and City-making through stories of everyday resilience in India states that cities are not just concrete and infrastructures, but contested Cartographies of our desires and aspirations. The only way to survive a big city is to then fictionalize it — make it our own – wrap it in our stories. This project engages with sex as an archive of reading the city for the multitudes that are peripheralised through caste, class, religion and sexualities in India.
This project proposes storytelling as urban making and a step towards decolonizing our cities. It has two components:
1) it intends to enhance the value and reach of an ongoing work on a USF funded monograph, by going beyond the textual to turn it into more than just text – a visual storytelling.
2) the project envisages to disseminate research findings and methodological interventions through storytelling workshops with marginalised caste and queer communities in Delhi and around.
The aim is to engage with and empower communities to co-create urban knowledges and read urban as messy texts. The purpose is to create a zine of auto-ethnographic story telling which can be shared with community organizers and activists. The proposed workshops will both methodologically equip the participants to map their own urban worlds, but hope, will allow to disseminate these knowledges and methods beyond this cohort and into the communities.