Director,  Intermedia Research Studio

Department of Sociology, University of Alberta

http://www.artsrn.ualberta.ca/irs/

Research Coordinator, RePublicU, a critical university studies research collaboration

https://sites.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/research-2-reclaim/

RESEARCH AREAS

• Commons Theory
• Decolonizing Critical Theory
• Intermedia Research Creation
• Development Dispossession

CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS

Decolonizing Theory

The Commons and the Convergence of Crisis: Decolonizing Critical Theory  undertakes to decolonize contemporary theories of the commons. This research project explores sites of engagement between the cultural and class politics of the convergence of social and ecological crises. Argued from the perspectives of the histories of modern world systemic subalternity, the resulting book contributes to the formation of a radically post-Western Marxism and to contemporary southern critical theory.

Intermedia Research

Intermedia Commons is a research project developing an intermedia praxis of the commons. The project explores the politics of rights to the global urban commons through case studies of development dispossession in South Asia and Northern Canada. The research creation components of this project includes a series of time bias poems, subaltern counter-environment installations and digital storytelling tools that intermediate research case studies for their constituencies and publics.

Toxic Media Ecologies is a collaborative research project that that investigates ways power intoxicates the intermedia environments we find ourselves in at this conjuncture of converging planetary crises. How do intersecting systems of oppression fabricate spectacular crises while rendering invisible enduring and intensifying ones? How do they silence dissent, disarm critique, data-mine dreams, alienate solidarities, and disarticulate self-organizing common autonomies?

Subaltern Counter-environments of the Internet of Things is a research project that engages with the current debates regarding creative economies by interrogating the ideological fields of both creativity and economy as they are now being articulated through the stakes of climate change politics. This research explores the creativity of the social reproductive, right to the city, survival politics of the development dispossessed in South Asia.

Kolkata Wonderland: Information Technology Outsourcing and Global Infrastructures of Inequality is a digital storytelling and online educational resource on outsourcing and uneven development in India. Co-directed with Dr. Gail Faurschou. Drawing on extensive field work in Kolkata between 2006-2010, this digital tool examines the effects of the development of a new Special Economic Zone for multinational IT & ITES corporations on the older urban fabric and lived environments of Kolkata and explores the division of labour and the linkages of urban places that connect the old city with the new suburb.

RePublicU

RePublicU is a collaborative critical university studies research project that explores the structural transformations that universities are currently undergoing. This research also aims at normative, imaginative construction. As my contribution to this collaboration, I am currently studying how universities in Western Canada are being pulled in opposite directions through linkages with green capital and the challenges of inventing a circular economy on the one hand and the vested interests of oil and other natural resource extraction industries on the other.

RESEARCH NETWORK COLLABORATIONS

• Arts and the Anthropocene Social Justice Research ColLab, University of Alberta
• Intersections of Sustainability, University of Alberta
• Corporate Power Mapping, University of Victoria

UPCOMING GRADUATE SEMINAR

SOCIOLOGY 580

COLONIALISM, POSTCOLONIALISM, GLOBALIZATION:

DECOLONIZING THE ANTHROPOCENE

This course examines the world scale process of social change called globalization from its two convergent manifestations. On the one hand, drawing on a world system perspective, the course examines how the globalization of the capitalist mode of social reproduction has given rise to a series of world systemic social crises: social inequality, hunger, conflict, oppression, debt peonage, unemployment, a myriad threats to human health all amidst unprecedented concentrations of wealth and power among transnationally linked social elites. On the other hand, drawing on a world ecology perspective, the course examines the global-local ecological degradations and dangers characteristic of our era. We examine the reasons for thinking that there is a systemic relationship between global social crises and global ecological crises of various kinds and set out to develop a theoretical framework able to comprehend this systemic convergence and generate guiding ideas for social movement engagement with these global crises.

Some of the key concepts and ideas we explore in depth include crisis, the commons, enclosures, ecology, environment, contradiction, accumulation, labour, reproduction, labour, capital, praxes, decolonizing sociology, subalternization, reification and dialectical skepticism. Some of the major crises we examine include those of war, refugees, hunger, poverty, debt, food, agriculture, deforestation, desertification, water scarcity, unemployment, urban degradation, toxic bodies, ocean death and especially carbon based energy dependence and climate change.

For details contact me at: sourayan@ualberta.ca