Syed Shoaib Ali

Syed Shoaib Ali
Indian Institute of Technology Delhi | IIT Delhi · Department of Humanities and Social Sciences

PhD

About

7
Publications
2,092
Reads
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355
Citations
Introduction
My broad academic interests lie at the confluence of an emerging multi-disciplinary conversation on the aesthetics of nature, as they get co-produced in art, architecture, science, policy, and technology worlds.
Additional affiliations
July 2023 - present
Southasia Institute of Advanced Studies (SIAS)
Position
  • Postdoctoral Researcher
Description
  • At SIAS, I am a part of the team of researchers who seek to produce a better understanding of the events and mechanisms through which forestry has evolved as a science and practice in the Himalayas. Through multi-sited fieldwork in Nepal and Himachal Pradesh (India) I plan to map the conjuncture of past plantations, failures, participatory approaches, and global warming inflexions as they become part of multiple articulations on forests and forestry.
July 2023 - December 2024
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Position
  • Postdoctoral Researcher

Publications

Publications (7)
Article
The broad success of development initiatives and ensuing material prosperity in rural areas of the Indian Himalayas have seen an increasing number of families route their increased surpluses to nearby urban areas in search of speculative footholds. Yet, the region continues to be viewed as essentially rural by policy and academic literatures. This...
Article
Full-text available
The global COVID-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented disruption to lives and livelihoods around the world. These disruptions have brought into sharp focus experiences of vulnerability but also, at times, evidence of resilience as people and institutions gear up to respond to the crisis. Drawing on intensive qualitative enquiry in 16 villages of H...
Article
Over the past three decades, governments around the world have undertaken reforms for decentralization. These reforms are founded on the belief that more democratic participation in local governance will lead to better outcomes for rural development, public service delivery, and environmental governance. However, the effects of these efforts have b...
Article
Full-text available
COVID-19 and its associated disease control measures have greatly altered everyday life. The burden of these challenges has fallen disproportionately on women. Drawing on qualitative inquiry in agrarian north India and Nepal, this research note analyzes how South Asian COVID-19 lockdowns have affected women's labor responsibilities in sometimes sur...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The main goal of this paper is to show that crowdworkers collaborate to fulfill technical and social needs left by the platform they work on. That is, crowdworkers are not the independent, autonomous workers they are often assumed to be, but instead work within a social network of other crowdworkers. Crowdworkers collaborate with members of their n...
Article
Under what conditions might the acquisition of new skills challenge discriminatory social norms? We interrogate this question through reference to a study on the social impacts of an agricultural skill development scheme in rural India. We present detailed vignettes drawn from this study, which illustrate the social consequences of acquiring and ut...

Questions

Questions (2)
Question
My research project draws on scholarship in environmental anthropology and STS that is influenced by developments in speculative realism. Specifically, my PhD investigates aesthetics of agriculture science in everyday lives of agriculture scientists, extension professionals, farmers, and peasant labor involved with apple trees in Western Himalayas. I was motivated by Timothy Morton’s articulation of aesthetics In Hyperobjects. Within Science and Technology Studies (STS) identifying aesthetics can linger somewhere between attention to care within existing and emergent ecological, techno-scientific assemblages and attention to design/discourse. To me, aesthetics capture affective sense of both situated within everyday labor. Aesthetics can represent both - different worlds and scattered, dispersed acts of worlding in them. I feel drawn towards the concept, but I need more clarity.
How would you suggest that I clearly conceptualise methodological attention to workplace aesthetics (which to me would be orchards, nurseries, laboratories, agriculture universities, corporate and department boardrooms, trainings and demonstrations)? What resources should I draw on?
Question
Multi-sited?

Network

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