Developing our work on 'The Monsoon Above and Below Ground', as a result of our research with the ERC funded project 'Monsoon Assemblages', this paper intervenes and expands on the discourse of the thermal in reference to the monsoon.
Long abstract:
Anthropologists, architects, and social scholars of science have in recent years revived the discourse of the thermal in reference to wetness and humidity in the context of the severe heat phases and the climate breakdown in the global south. We notice that while the discourse calls on urgent action to secure human life and livelihood in the context of the anthropocene, the analytics of heat within monsoonal worlds retains methodologies of imperial metrics and approaches of interpreting humidity and its relationship to embodiment in the context of heat.
By merging our shared scholarship on how notions of thermal water below the ground (Powis) and in the air (Bhat) animate monsoonal science and knowledge, we seek to expose critical issues in how monsoonal potential is understood and crafted in an environment of uncertainty. How does a thermal theorisation of water differ from what is below the ground to the air? How does monsoon politics inform the temporality of the thermal characteristics of water below the ground and the air 'we' breathe? Based on our research in architecture and the environmental humanities, this paper uses colonial archives, as well as primary fieldwork on contemporary regimes of thermal power, in order to intervene and expand on the discourse of the thermal in reference to the monsoon.