CSAS Lecture Series | Atmospheric Citizenship: Distributions of Life in the Wake of Delhi’s Airpocalypse

D. Asher Ghertner is an associate professor in the Department of Geography and director of the South Asian Studies Program at Rutgers University. His current research project, “Bad Air: The Cultural Politics of Breathing in ‘the World’s Most Air-Polluted City’,” builds on ethnographic, legal, and archival research to examine how templates of segregation are being remapped onto the three-dimensional space of the atmosphere, and how class- and caste-based exclusions are being reimagined in the wake of the WHO's declaration that Delhi’s air the worst in the world. His first book, Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi (Oxford University Press, 2015), was an ethnography of mass slum demolition, charting the rise of a mode of governing space premised on urban aesthetics.