Harshavardhan Bhat | The Ohio State University (original) (raw)
Papers by Harshavardhan Bhat
Aquatic Encounters , 2024
Entry: Rain and Capitalism Aquatic Encounters (2024) Edited by Anastasia A Khodyreva and Elina S... more Entry: Rain and Capitalism
Aquatic Encounters (2024)
Edited by Anastasia A Khodyreva and Elina Suoyrjö
Published by Rooftop Press, Helsinki
9788011035238
wexner center for the arts , 2023
From the Wex: "This thoughtful, poetic essay by offers a response to , the work now on view in Th... more From the Wex: "This thoughtful, poetic essay by offers a response to , the work now on view in The Box by Illya Mousavijad, an assistant professor of art and technology at Ohio State. The digitally animated piece brings motion to items from Mousavijad's home country of Iran such as food and glassware, creating a form of dance with these inanimate objects on a landscape of moving rugs. Bhat is a researcher and writer interested in the social study of monsoonal futures. He's currently a postdoctoral fellow at Ohio State's Translational Data Analytics Institute."
Rubber Boots Methods for the Anthropocene, 2022
International Relations in the Anthropocene, 2021
The engagement with the Anthropocene is a form of methodological trouble for International Relati... more The engagement with the Anthropocene is a form of methodological trouble for International Relations (IR). Interrupting human-nature binaries and subject-object divides requires work. As an example of a possible methodological approach in/of the Anthropocene, this chapter focuses on the weather—not simply as an object of knowledge but as a material knowledge system in the making and unmaking of IR itself. This chapter shows how the weather is always a method in international relations and its study. There are three parts to this chapter. The first part thinks with rice as a commodity of monsoonal spaces, bringing it in conversation with the spatio-temporalities of IR. The second part engages with Black Studies and scholarship that examines the lives and afterlives of transatlantic slavery and how some of that scholarship, embedded within IR, thinks of the weather. The third is an invitation for speculation with the knowledge systems in/of airborne matters we have come to deeply know.
GeoHumanities - Space, Place, and the Humanities , 2021
How do we understand more-than-human vegetal emergence in/with/under monsoonal transformation? I ... more How do we understand more-than-human vegetal emergence in/with/under monsoonal transformation? I often like to introduce the monsoon to people by telling them that it is the change in the direction of the wind that carries the ocean to the sky, blanketing the geological spatio-temporality of the Indian subcontinent, transforming its air and everything in its temporal wake with the possibility of life. This paper thinks through the invasive vilayati kikar which has overwhelmed native monsoon forests and arid ecologies. Drawing from fieldwork in the Delhi region conducted during monsoon 2018, 2019 and the winter of 2018, and by thinking with literature and reports from ecology, biology, politics, anthropology and natural science—I attempt a brief situated narrative that explores the vegetal emergence of the plant, its natureculture spirits and embodiment in/with the monsoon—finally, closing this work with an argument and discussion on the monsoon and its ontological stickiness.
Monsoon [+other] Grounds, 2020
Fieldsights, Society for Cultural Anthropology , 2019
Associated with lightning, thunder, rain and monsoonal flows, Malhar is a raga of Indian classica... more Associated with lightning, thunder, rain and monsoonal flows, Malhar is a raga of Indian classical music. Malhar as an anthropogenic element(ality) is entangled with myth and stories of its ability to call on the rains. It’s a sound believed to inspire the clouds – as a vibration that desires the rain and thunder into being. I discuss Malhar in this contribution as a relation produced by this interlocutory moment between the human and the monsoons.
Hyphen Journal , 2019
In this brief essay, I chat about some of the anxieties of writing about monsoon airs. New Delhi,... more In this brief essay, I chat about some of the anxieties of writing about monsoon airs. New Delhi, as my material interlocutor, provides me with a wealth of stories, ideas and observations. For this issue for Hyphen, I informally stitch together some hyphenated arguments and feelings associated with mucus, confrontation and depression, and their temporal affiliations in the articulation of an air of the monsoon. Observations arise out of my research fieldwork during the winter months of 2018 entangled with work from summer 2018, collaborating in the versioning and dreaming of a methodology.
Mapping and Politics in the Digital Age , 2018
This chapter engages critically with some emerging issues of mapping through an analysis of the A... more This chapter engages critically with some emerging issues of mapping through an analysis of the Aadhar identification programme in India. This programme of biometric mapping, increasingly prevalent in governance systems across the world, raises fundamental questions about what is at stake for the body of the human and the body of the nation in these developments. The Aadhar Programme, run under the auspices of the Unique Identification Authority of India, frames a techno-political set of ‘terms and conditions’, transforming traditional ideas of politics and citizenship. These are discussed in terms of four conceptual framings that seek to draw out the intended and unintended dynamics of the regime and the speculative alternatives inherent to it: triage, providing mapping with an indefinite ground of extension; the glitch, providing a more distributed and contingent framing for the intensification of the regime; the platform, the interface between regime and population; and finally, subtraction, a speculative call for imagining possibilities otherwise, already mapped by the Aadhar project.
in Volume #51: Augmented Technology. October, 2017.
Stability: International Journal of Security and Development , 2015
The post-conflict economy, rapid urbanization and the ever influential impact of global flows hav... more The post-conflict economy, rapid urbanization and the ever influential impact of global flows have often driven ‘particular’ systems of post-conflict infrastructure driving past and ignoring the nuances of culture, politics and community. Contrary to what a large numbers of analysts today argue about this to be a growing symptom of the security/aid/post-conflict economy, there has arguably always been a fundamental relationship between political articulation and architectural futures. The purpose of this paper is not perhaps to provide for another planning parallax but to offer the reader an approach towards thinking about the nature of habitat intervention possibly required within reconciliatory platforms and political developments from an alternative perspective. Utilizing African cases, including facade development in Kigali - Rwanda and continuing interrogations on the Kenya - Somalia border-area ‘habitats’, this paper seeks to position research in a juxtaposition posing both analytical and ethical consideration of two lines of enquiry. Firstly, can international development mediate with politics in engaging with post-conflict habitats with a certain ‘benchmarked’ dignity considering complexities in the background. Secondly, how does this therefore challenge conventional thinking in planning and organization schemes that have largely driven habitat response and development in post-conflict spaces?
A conversation on resilience would be incomplete without a conversation on decay. Throughout urba... more A conversation on resilience would be incomplete without a conversation on decay. Throughout urban spaces in the global south today, one witnesses a constant viewership of decay, both which is accepted and negotiated constantly. In certain instances it invokes a sense of poverty and sensibilities of curiosity and exploration which the sanitized space sometimes fails to provoke. The challenge however is a complex narrative crosscutting architectural theory, practice, urban planning and culture. The paper offers a variety of contrasting examples of how decay takes an aesthetic form and offers space for alternative negotiations to be identified at the same time.
As a conversation on new urbanism, this phenomenon can be tracked across a variety of urban cases. The paper presents two examples of such undertakings and attempts by meticulous documentation, comparative study and photographic capture to present a reasonable rationale. As a theoretical discussion, the paper also interrogates the need for bringing back the likes of Laurie Baker’s style in re-synthesizing equity in equitable architectural manifestations considering the large impact of impatient capital on these new geographies.
Book Reviews by Harshavardhan Bhat
Anthroposphere - the Oxford Climate Review , 2019
A Short Review of Deborah Bird Rose's Wild Dog Dreaming – Love and Extinction (2011), University ... more A Short Review of Deborah Bird Rose's Wild Dog Dreaming – Love and Extinction (2011), University of Virginia Press
Teaching Documents by Harshavardhan Bhat
Aquatic Encounters , 2024
Entry: Rain and Capitalism Aquatic Encounters (2024) Edited by Anastasia A Khodyreva and Elina S... more Entry: Rain and Capitalism
Aquatic Encounters (2024)
Edited by Anastasia A Khodyreva and Elina Suoyrjö
Published by Rooftop Press, Helsinki
9788011035238
wexner center for the arts , 2023
From the Wex: "This thoughtful, poetic essay by offers a response to , the work now on view in Th... more From the Wex: "This thoughtful, poetic essay by offers a response to , the work now on view in The Box by Illya Mousavijad, an assistant professor of art and technology at Ohio State. The digitally animated piece brings motion to items from Mousavijad's home country of Iran such as food and glassware, creating a form of dance with these inanimate objects on a landscape of moving rugs. Bhat is a researcher and writer interested in the social study of monsoonal futures. He's currently a postdoctoral fellow at Ohio State's Translational Data Analytics Institute."
Rubber Boots Methods for the Anthropocene, 2022
International Relations in the Anthropocene, 2021
The engagement with the Anthropocene is a form of methodological trouble for International Relati... more The engagement with the Anthropocene is a form of methodological trouble for International Relations (IR). Interrupting human-nature binaries and subject-object divides requires work. As an example of a possible methodological approach in/of the Anthropocene, this chapter focuses on the weather—not simply as an object of knowledge but as a material knowledge system in the making and unmaking of IR itself. This chapter shows how the weather is always a method in international relations and its study. There are three parts to this chapter. The first part thinks with rice as a commodity of monsoonal spaces, bringing it in conversation with the spatio-temporalities of IR. The second part engages with Black Studies and scholarship that examines the lives and afterlives of transatlantic slavery and how some of that scholarship, embedded within IR, thinks of the weather. The third is an invitation for speculation with the knowledge systems in/of airborne matters we have come to deeply know.
GeoHumanities - Space, Place, and the Humanities , 2021
How do we understand more-than-human vegetal emergence in/with/under monsoonal transformation? I ... more How do we understand more-than-human vegetal emergence in/with/under monsoonal transformation? I often like to introduce the monsoon to people by telling them that it is the change in the direction of the wind that carries the ocean to the sky, blanketing the geological spatio-temporality of the Indian subcontinent, transforming its air and everything in its temporal wake with the possibility of life. This paper thinks through the invasive vilayati kikar which has overwhelmed native monsoon forests and arid ecologies. Drawing from fieldwork in the Delhi region conducted during monsoon 2018, 2019 and the winter of 2018, and by thinking with literature and reports from ecology, biology, politics, anthropology and natural science—I attempt a brief situated narrative that explores the vegetal emergence of the plant, its natureculture spirits and embodiment in/with the monsoon—finally, closing this work with an argument and discussion on the monsoon and its ontological stickiness.
Monsoon [+other] Grounds, 2020
Fieldsights, Society for Cultural Anthropology , 2019
Associated with lightning, thunder, rain and monsoonal flows, Malhar is a raga of Indian classica... more Associated with lightning, thunder, rain and monsoonal flows, Malhar is a raga of Indian classical music. Malhar as an anthropogenic element(ality) is entangled with myth and stories of its ability to call on the rains. It’s a sound believed to inspire the clouds – as a vibration that desires the rain and thunder into being. I discuss Malhar in this contribution as a relation produced by this interlocutory moment between the human and the monsoons.
Hyphen Journal , 2019
In this brief essay, I chat about some of the anxieties of writing about monsoon airs. New Delhi,... more In this brief essay, I chat about some of the anxieties of writing about monsoon airs. New Delhi, as my material interlocutor, provides me with a wealth of stories, ideas and observations. For this issue for Hyphen, I informally stitch together some hyphenated arguments and feelings associated with mucus, confrontation and depression, and their temporal affiliations in the articulation of an air of the monsoon. Observations arise out of my research fieldwork during the winter months of 2018 entangled with work from summer 2018, collaborating in the versioning and dreaming of a methodology.
Mapping and Politics in the Digital Age , 2018
This chapter engages critically with some emerging issues of mapping through an analysis of the A... more This chapter engages critically with some emerging issues of mapping through an analysis of the Aadhar identification programme in India. This programme of biometric mapping, increasingly prevalent in governance systems across the world, raises fundamental questions about what is at stake for the body of the human and the body of the nation in these developments. The Aadhar Programme, run under the auspices of the Unique Identification Authority of India, frames a techno-political set of ‘terms and conditions’, transforming traditional ideas of politics and citizenship. These are discussed in terms of four conceptual framings that seek to draw out the intended and unintended dynamics of the regime and the speculative alternatives inherent to it: triage, providing mapping with an indefinite ground of extension; the glitch, providing a more distributed and contingent framing for the intensification of the regime; the platform, the interface between regime and population; and finally, subtraction, a speculative call for imagining possibilities otherwise, already mapped by the Aadhar project.
in Volume #51: Augmented Technology. October, 2017.
Stability: International Journal of Security and Development , 2015
The post-conflict economy, rapid urbanization and the ever influential impact of global flows hav... more The post-conflict economy, rapid urbanization and the ever influential impact of global flows have often driven ‘particular’ systems of post-conflict infrastructure driving past and ignoring the nuances of culture, politics and community. Contrary to what a large numbers of analysts today argue about this to be a growing symptom of the security/aid/post-conflict economy, there has arguably always been a fundamental relationship between political articulation and architectural futures. The purpose of this paper is not perhaps to provide for another planning parallax but to offer the reader an approach towards thinking about the nature of habitat intervention possibly required within reconciliatory platforms and political developments from an alternative perspective. Utilizing African cases, including facade development in Kigali - Rwanda and continuing interrogations on the Kenya - Somalia border-area ‘habitats’, this paper seeks to position research in a juxtaposition posing both analytical and ethical consideration of two lines of enquiry. Firstly, can international development mediate with politics in engaging with post-conflict habitats with a certain ‘benchmarked’ dignity considering complexities in the background. Secondly, how does this therefore challenge conventional thinking in planning and organization schemes that have largely driven habitat response and development in post-conflict spaces?
A conversation on resilience would be incomplete without a conversation on decay. Throughout urba... more A conversation on resilience would be incomplete without a conversation on decay. Throughout urban spaces in the global south today, one witnesses a constant viewership of decay, both which is accepted and negotiated constantly. In certain instances it invokes a sense of poverty and sensibilities of curiosity and exploration which the sanitized space sometimes fails to provoke. The challenge however is a complex narrative crosscutting architectural theory, practice, urban planning and culture. The paper offers a variety of contrasting examples of how decay takes an aesthetic form and offers space for alternative negotiations to be identified at the same time.
As a conversation on new urbanism, this phenomenon can be tracked across a variety of urban cases. The paper presents two examples of such undertakings and attempts by meticulous documentation, comparative study and photographic capture to present a reasonable rationale. As a theoretical discussion, the paper also interrogates the need for bringing back the likes of Laurie Baker’s style in re-synthesizing equity in equitable architectural manifestations considering the large impact of impatient capital on these new geographies.
Anthroposphere - the Oxford Climate Review , 2019
A Short Review of Deborah Bird Rose's Wild Dog Dreaming – Love and Extinction (2011), University ... more A Short Review of Deborah Bird Rose's Wild Dog Dreaming – Love and Extinction (2011), University of Virginia Press