Dr Raina Ghosh and Dr Nian Paul
Funding period: 1 March 2027 – 31 July 2027
Type of funding:
Event Support Funding
DOI: https://doi.org/10.69752/2RWD-1055
Award Number: USF-EVT-261001
This grant was awarded a joint outcome of the USF International Fellowship projects More-than-human urbanisms and sacred riverfronts: Hindu nationalism, informal authority, and the everyday politics of urban space in India (Dr Raina Ghosh) and ‘Public Art for Whom?’: Art and its Exclusionary Publics in Delhi (Dr Nian Paul).
Partner organisations: University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands), Decolab (United Kingdom)
Lead organisers: Dr Raina Ghosh, Visiting Fellow, University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands), Dr Nian Paul, Independent Researcher/Research Lead, Decolab (United Kingdom/India)
Team members: Dr Lakshmi Priya Rajendran, Associate Professor, Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (United Kingdom), Dr Bikramaditya Kumar Choudhary, Assistant Professor, Jawaharlal Nehru University (India), Mr Amrit Raj, Independent Filmmaker and PhD Research Scholar, Cinema Studies, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University (India), Ms Yuvashree Mohan, Independent Visual Artist, Pondicherry (India)
Contact: Dr Raina Ghosh
Abstract:
The urban polycrisis is at the forefront of global debates against the backdrop of unfolding crises of genocide, climate change, resource extraction, economic contraction, political turmoil, housing shortages, socio-political marginalisation, and uneven development trajectories—especially in cities of the Global South, which continue to bear the legacies of colonialism. Urban scholarship reveals that these crises are intricately embedded in daily spaces, routines, practices, and interactions. Engaging with the ‘everyday urban’ demands a contextually grounded methodological approach. Creative works like Joe Sacco’s Palestine and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and films such as City of God (2002), Not Just Roads (2020), and Natura Urbana (2017), have shed light on urban realities through journalistic, graphic, visual, and cinematic storytelling—offering vivid, emotionally resonant, and politically engaged accounts that challenge traditional academic conventions. At the same time, while decolonial and feminist interventions in research methodologies have questioned the primacy of academic writing, alternative forms of communicating urban politics still remain largely marginal within mainstream scholarship.
The event series, Urban political and creative storytelling, seeks to collaboratively explore two sets of questions that concern contemporary urban scholarship:
- How do we decolonise the way we understand, research, politicise and articulate urban crises as a part of critical urban research?
- What possibilities do feminist and decolonial creative methods offer in attempting to experiment with a more epistemically sound praxis of engaging with the urban?
This project unfolds through a series of interconnected events that bring together researchers, artists, practitioners, and grassroots activists to explore the socio-political dynamics of urban life. The series features two knowledge-mobilisation labs (Delhi and online) and a conference panel (Gwangju, South Korea) in 2027, both designed to deepen public understanding of urban crises and foster new forms of engagement.
By centring the works of artists, practitioners, researchers, grassroots activists, and urban collectives, the event series aims to show how a city and the political co-constitute one another. In doing so, it moves beyond a methodological intervention to decolonise the epistemologies through which we communicate the ‘urban political’ beyond academia’s dominant intellectual paradigms. It foregrounds decolonial and feminist approaches to epistemic justice as a project rooted in pluriversal and disruptive pedagogies.