Asher Ghertner wil give a job talk for the URBAN HUMANITIES MELLON PROFESSORSHIP

in the Department of Art History, 303 Silver Center, Jan 31, 6:15.  TITLE OF TALK TBA.

He describes himself on his Rutgers DEPARTMENT OF GEOGRAPHY webpage thus:

I am an interdisciplinary geographer interested in the technologies and tactics through which mass displacement is conceived, justified and enacted. My research uses the contemporary politics of urban renewal in India to challenge conventional theories of economic transition, city planning, and political rule. I taught for two years at the London School of Economics before joining Rutgers in 2012. I am also the Director of the South Asian Studies Program at Rutgers.

My book (Oxford University Press, 2015) uses the case of Delhi’s millennial effort to become a world-class city to show how aesthetic norms can replace the procedures of mapping and surveying typically considered necessary to administer space. The practice of evaluating territory based on its adherence to aesthetic norms – what I call “rule by aesthetics” – allowed the state in Delhi to intervene in the once ungovernable space of slums, overcoming its historical reliance on inaccurate maps and statistics. Slums were declared illegal because they looked illegal, an arrangement that led to the displacement of a million slum residents in the first decade of the 21st century. Drawing on close ethnographic engagement with the slum residents targeted for removal, as well as the planners, judges, and politicians who targeted them, the book demonstrates how easily plans, laws, and democratic procedures can be subverted once the subjects of democracy are seen as visually out of place. Slum dwellers’ creative appropriation of dominant aesthetic norms shows, however, that aesthetic rule does not mark the end of democratic claims making. Rather, it signals a new relationship between the mechanism of government and the practice of politics, one in which struggles for a more inclusive city rely more than ever on urban aesthetics, in Delhi and in aspiring world-class cities the world over.

His book

Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi

is also described on the SSRC WEBSITE.