Description:

The Art, Community, and Environment Research Workshop is kicking off its Winter 2025 series LAND and HOME AS ARCHIVE and PEDAGOGY with a two-part workshop that explores the work of Nitin Bathla.

Friday, January 17, 9:30-12:00 pm
Art History Seminar Room, Kresge 4354
Not Just Roads film screening and reading discussion with snacks!

Please rsvp to rpuleo@u.northwestern.edu for a PDF of the readings and to help in ordering the right amount of snacks! 🍩🍓🥐

Join us January 17 for a film screening of Bathla’s new film, Not Just Roads (more below), and a discussion of readings selected from his new co-edited volume, Researching Otherwise: Pluriversal Methodologies in Landscape and Urban Studies.

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Tuesday, January 21, 10:30-12:00 pm, 
Zoom link: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/93238763952

On January 21, we will gather again for a virtual discussion with Bathla about his interdisciplinary work in landscape and urban studies.

NOT JUST ROADS is an ethnographic documentary film that narrates the story of a massive urban transformation underway in India. Highways are being constructed at an unprecedented rate of 23 kilometers per day under the Indian government's Bharatmala (‘Garland of Limitless Roads’) program. The program aims to open new territories for the emerging Indian middle class. Currently, the territory is inhabited by villages, working class neighborhoods, and nomadic herders. It is crisscrossed by native trails and vital ecological commons. This film captures the story of one such highway outside Delhi, from the perspective of human and non-human actors.

NITIN BATHLA is Zurich-based scholar, practitioner, and activist. He is the author of the award-winning book Researching Otherwise: Pluriversal Methodologies in Landscape and Urban Studies and the critically acclaimed documentary film Not Just Roads. He currently holds a dual affiliation with the Department of Geography at the University of Zurich and the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich. 

Art, Community, and Environment, a Kaplan Humanities Institute Research Workshop, is co-convened by Rebecca Zorach and Hollyamber Kennedy (Art History) with Graduate Assistant Risa Puleo (Art History). This research workshop brings together faculty and graduate students interested in the intersections among art and architectural practice, environmental studies, and communities. We seek to broaden definitions of knowledge production beyond the academic to include Indigenous and oppositional knowledge, collaborative practice, reparative design, and activist research.