Author Archives: Misria Shaik Ali

I am currently a Post-Doctoral Fellow at IIT-Delhi. I hold PhD in Science and Technology Studies (STS) from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. My research advances Critical Nuclear Studies and the concept of Epistemologies of Neglect cohering STS, Feminist Science, Postcolonial & Sensory Studies, Agnotology, etc.
A picture of the hand of a farmer with his palm facing towards the camera. There is white powder-like substances which are abraded soil and rocks in the farmer.

Necrovitality and Porous Exclusions: On Dying amidst Chemical Vitalities

Note: This post contains images of skin wounds. If you are dermatophobic, read/view at your own discretion. You may instead listen to the post. An entry into the world through the pore urges us to see the chemical and material world as vital, volatile, viscous, transcorporeal–some of the topics addressed in the Platypus series, “Witnessing the porous world.” Jane Bennett, in describing and diving into the “life of metal,” begins by asking, “can nonorganic bodies also have a life?  Can materiality itself be vital?” (2009, 53). Life, for Bennett as they converse with philosophers Deleuze and Nietzsche is, “a-subjective” and “impersonal” (54). Bennett’s effort to “avoid anthropocentrism and biocentrism”, leads them to “material” and “metallic vitality” that is imminent from “vacancies,” “holes,” and “cracks” that render material “porous” (59-61). (read more...)

A foot of a farmer walking on an agricultural field bedded with dry gravel that is reddish-orange. A black irrigation drip pipe, that is about 12 mm in diameter, runs horizontally on the ground and the farmer's feet is placed along the drip pipe, horizontally. The farmer is wearing a simple yellowish-orange rubber slipper that seems mildly tainted with mud. His foot has slipped off his feet as he has stepped on the drip pipe. A drop of water is dripping from the hole in the drip pipe.

Witnessing the Porous World

Pores compose materials around us such as gypsum, clay, lead, concrete, whose strength and durability are paradoxically analyzed in their capacity to resist porosity, or contain. Anthropogenic engagements with pores hold this ambivalence–resisting to perceive pore as a passage into the world and reducing them to their instrumental capacity to hold and contain. (read more...)