February 22, 2022, 1:15pm
Virtual, 114 Avery
Disassembling Coal: Finance Capital, Land, and Environmental Justice in South India
Lecture by Mukul Kumar, Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Public Policy at the University of California, Irvine.
Spring 2022 LiPS events will be virtual via Zoom. Columbia affiliates holding a green pass can attend a live screening in 114 Avery. Register in advance for the Zoom webinar here link.
Over the last three decades of liberalization, India’s coal industry has been transformed from a state-owned monopoly into a vast assemblage of parastatal and multinational corporations. Drawing upon the case of how one of the largest proposed coal-fired power plants in south India has been disassembled, this talk calls for an analysis of the instabilities and limits of global fossil fuel industries. The talk examines how a range of conjunctural events and elements—from unruly legal disputes over land to the materiality and price of imported coal—have led to the fracturing of emergent coal infrastructures. Such processes of disassembling coal have implications for broader discussions of environmental justice within the context of global forms of energy and financial extraction.
Mukul Kumar is Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Public Policy at the University of California, Irvine. His research and teaching interests include climate justice, energy and environment, political ecology, social movements, and global urbanism. Kumar received his Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from UC Berkeley and his MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge.
Organized by the PhD students in the Urban Planning Program at Columbia GSAPP. Free and open to the public.
Virtual events hosted on Zoom Webinar do not require an account to attend, advanced registration is encouraged. GSAPP is committed to providing universal access to all of our virtual events. Please contact up@arch.columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.
