Post-Doctoral Fellow, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi
Contributing Editor, Platypus, The CASTAC Blog
About Misria
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.
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Contributions to Platypus, The CASTAC Blog
View all of Misria's posts on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.
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). (more…) (read more...)
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. (more…) (read more...)