The first draw is my chronic research interest. Delhi’s toxic air has been my research partner for some time. “Delhi”, “toxic”, and “air” by themselves open up inquiries of place, toxicity, porosity, and their uncertain combinations. First, air does not respect borders, yet we find concentrated toxicities at urban peripheries. Spheres of purified air only accessible to those who can spend money to buy it. Second, toxicity has long subverted the molecular imagination: what is PM2.5 but a strategy in visualising chemistry that travels as an assemblage and not as a crystallographic structure? Third, people and their attendant visualizing strategies are striving to make sense of blindspots in air pollution science, epidemiology, and public health. Studying the topic has meant being immersed in an immensely rich and vibrating field of visualisations. The second draw is the current distressing political moment in the Indian subcontinent that has awakened drowsy toxic histories of how to imagine a nation state and its boundaries that question secular constitutionalism. As citizenship of people born in a nation state is questioned, what does it mean for who can claim environmental justice? How have scientists and other people who have participated in science in some way engaged with questions of citizenship and belonging in South Asia? How do I then select and curate out of this already existing field? What genealogies of experimentation and curation would I be attentive and faithful to? What kind of solidarities of place would I build towards?
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