Fwd: NIAS Announcement | Book Discussion on Monday, 15 December 2025, 4:00 PM onwards | “Chronicles of a Global City: Speculative Lives and Unsettled Futures in Bengaluru” | Lecture Hall, NIAS
Vinay Sreenivasa
From: Carol Upadhya <carol....@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 3 Dec 2025 at 12:03
Subject: Fwd: NIAS Announcement | Book Discussion on Monday, 15 December 2025, 4:00 PM onwards | “Chronicles of a Global City: Speculative Lives and Unsettled Futures in Bengaluru” | Lecture Hall, NIAS
To: Carol Upadhya <carolu...@gmail.com>
Panel Discussion
National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS)
Indian Institute of Science Campus, Bengaluru – 560012. INDIA.
Invites you to a Panel Discussion on
Chronicles of a Global City: Speculative Lives and Unsettled Futures in Bengaluru
By
Carol Upadhya
(Honorary Visiting Professor, School of Social Sciences, NIAS)
Kaveri Medappa
(Postdoctoral Researcher, Oxford University)
Swathi Shivanand
(Assistant Professor, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Bengaluru campus)
Narendar Pani
(JRD Tata Chair Visiting Professor, NIAS)
Ammu Joseph
(Bengaluru)
Chairperson: Supriya RoyChowdhury
Honorary Visiting Professor, NIAS
On
Date: Monday, 15 December 2025 | Venue: Lecture Hall, NIAS
Tea/Coffee: 3:30 PM | Session Time: 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM
* * * * *
About the Event: Drawing on the Speculative Urbanism project conducted at NIAS, Chronicles of a Global City (co-edited by Vinay Gidwani, Michael Goldman and Carol Upadhya, University of Minnesota Press, 2024, Yoda Press, 2025) vividly illuminates the multifaceted entanglements of finance capital, real estate markets, livelihood struggles, and fraying ecologies in urban and peri-urban Bengaluru. The volume turns Bengaluru inside out to examine its ‘world-city’ transformation that stimulated rapid urbanization and unbounded growth. Moving the spotlight away from the much-discussed IT industry, urban elites and the new middle class, the essays explore how people caught up in the whirlwinds of change—from construction laborers, street vendors, domestic workers, and platform delivery workers to small-time property brokers, petty landlords, and local politicians—experience, struggle, aspire, invent, strive and speculate to make a livable city for themselves. Co-editor Carol Upadhya and contributors Kaveri Medappa and Swathi Shivanand will present key insights from the volume, followed by comments a discussion by Ammu Joseph and Narendar Pani.
About the Speakers: Prof. Carol Upadhya, a social anthropologist, is Honorary Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru, India, where she heads the Urban and Mobility Studies Programme. Prof. Upadhya was co-PI of the Speculative Urbanism research project, which led to the book Chronicles of a Global City: Speculative Lives and Unsettled Futures in Bengaluru (co-edited with Vinay Gidwani and Michael Goldman; University of Minnesota Press, 2024 and Yoda Press, 2025). Her monograph on the Amaravati project in Andhra Pradesh, Urbanizing the Future: A New City Project in Agrarian South India, is forthcoming from Berghahn Books.
Dr. Kaveri Medappa is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Human Geography at the University of Oxford. Her work is largely based on qualitative, ethnographic research methods. Kaveri's research is at the intersections of feminist political economy, urban and labour geography, and critical development studies. Her PhD is an ethnographic study of platform-dependent food delivery workers and cab drivers in Bengaluru, India, and her current post-doctoral project examines the working lives of UK's truck drivers. Kaveri earlier worked as a research associate on the NSF-funded Speculative Urbanism project at NIAS.
Dr. Swathi Shivanand is an interdisciplinary historian with a body of work that focuses on urban, gender, labour, development and region. She is Assistant Professor at the Department of Liberal Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences in Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Bengaluru campus. She is a founding member of Khidki Collective, a public history initiative.
Ammu Joseph is an independent journalist and author based in Bangalore. Among her publications are six books: two on gender & media, three on gender & literature, and one on gender & war/“terror”. She has contributed to a number of other books and publications, both Indian and international. She was South Asia coordinator for the Global Research on Women in the News Media (International Women's Media Foundation) and has been closely involved with the Global Media Monitoring Project (Who Makes the News?) in India. She has served on the visiting faculty of several institutions of media education and is a founder-member of the Network of Women in Media, India. With degrees in English Literature (Madras University) and Public Communications (Syracuse University), as well as a PG diploma in Social Communications Media from the Maharashtra Board of Technical Education in between, she began her career in Mumbai in 1977 with Eve's Weekly. In her last salaried job within the press, she was editor of the Sunday magazine of The Indian Post, Mumbai.
Prof. Narendar Pani is the JRD Tata Chair Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru. He has been researching India’s political economy for the last four-and-a-half decades. This has led him to a wide range of issues, from land reforms (Reforms to Pre-empt Change: Land Legislation in Karnataka, Concept, 1983) to gender and globalization (Women at the Threshold of Globalization, Routledge 2012, with Nikky Singh). The research has also taken more conceptual routes from economic method (Inclusive Economics: Gandhian Method and Contemporary Policy, 2001) to urban theory (The City as Action: Retheorizing Urban Studies, Routledge, 2023). Over the last decade, he has headed a programme at NIAS on inequality and human development. He is currently working on a book on intrapersonal inequality.
* * * * * *
è For more information, please contact: Prof. Carol Upadhya @ carol....@nias.res.in
**************All are Invited *************
National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS),
Indian Institute of Science Campus,
Bengaluru – 560012. INDIA.
☏: +91 80 2218 5000 | @:
nia...@nias.res.in
| 🌏︎:
www.nias.res.in |
YouTube
|
|
Linked
This message contains information that may be privileged or confidential and is the property of NIAS organisation. It is intended only for the person to whom it is addressed. If you are not the intended recipient, you are not authorized to read, print, retain, copy, disseminate, distribute, or use this message or any part thereof. If you receive this message in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete all copies of this message.
Alternative Law Forum
98805 95032
122/4, Infantry Road,
(Opposite Infantry Wedding Hall)
Bangalore 560001