Paper short abstract:

With the link between climate change and air pollution becoming a fact, how do we understand New Delhi becoming the most polluted city in the world? This paper will seek to question how can a space of the most polluted city in the world be created by a free flowing, unboundable entity like air.

Paper long abstract:

Since 2014, New Delhi has been regularly appearing on the WHOs list of most polluted cities in the world. With the link between air pollution and climate change being recently established as a well proven fact, the work of air generally and air pollution specifically in creating a place cannot be ignored (UNEP 2019). Latour (2014), puts forth that the Anthropocene is a period where the politics of human agency 'is pushed to the centre but which simultaneously loses its boundary, consistence and definition because it is tied—morally tied—to all of what in earlier times would have been to use a now famous subtitle, "beyond the human"' (Latour 2014: 13). Taking this line of thought forward this paper will present an ethnography of air through an investigation of two forms of air: air as index and air as transboundary. How do scientific measurements of air allow it to work as an index to facilitate communication and policy, by the state in India, international organisation like WHO and others (Choy 2010)? Further, how does the indexing of air impact how air is experienced and breathed (Fuan 1977; Jee 2016)? This narrative of air as index will be problematized by the nature and materialization of air as a transboundary entity, to ask how can a space of the most polluted city in the world be created by a free flowing, unboundable entity like air.