Audible Waters
Audible Waters explores the acoustic production of underwater oceanic territory in postcolonial India and the Indian Ocean. It offers a new model for understanding oceanic territorialization across scales, from colossal scientific drives for planetary domination to small disappearing Indigenous neighborhoods in coastal cities. Through archival and field research across five cities in India and the US, the project foregrounds acoustic technologies as productive of spatio-political formations such as underwater borders, marine habitats, legal zones, and oil reserves. While scholarly interventions in the Indian Ocean world have traced surface migrations, slavery, trade and cultural exchange, Audible Waters delves into the oceanic netherworlds to critique techno-scientific modes of sensing that established the submarine realm as a new frontier for geopolitical and industrial expansion in the twentieth century. In so doing, it offers a novel understanding of two of the gravest concerns of the twenty-first century: technological acceleration and (un)sustainable futures.
Emerging from my current research, my next project is a critical exploration of media technologies for marine conservation in the northern Indian Ocean, especially the Arabian Sea. I study the history and politics of sonic media in relation to bioacoustics as a scientific field across India and Oman, as well as other regions in the Arabian Sea, to ask how marine habitats of different species are scientifically studied and technologically produced in relation to ongoing infrastructural projects for hydrocarbon extraction and trade in the region. I follow the complex and critical entanglements between endangered species (whales, sharks, fish), infrastructures (ports, rigs, ships), and media (sound, software, AI) that govern life and death, trade and extraction, as well as geopolitics and occupation in the Indian Ocean.
I have previously researched on the creation of urban media publics in North India through sonic infrastructures such as public address systems. Based on ethnographic and archival research, I argued that amplified sound is the singular means to address crowds during emergencies which makes it a life-saving infrastructure for public safety. I thereby placed amplified sound within a longer geneaology of media publics, where crowds are understood as physical rather than virtual aggregates.
I am also interested in non-Western histories of natural language processing, automatic speech recognition, and speech synthesis in contexts such as India where both multilingualism and non-literacy are prevalent. Histories of non-Western and ‘low-resource’ speech as well as textual corpora, processing multilingual phonetics and scripts, collaborations between non-Western institutions for developing such technologies, as well as the longer histories of colonial philology as they reappear in the current datafication of speech and language, have also been the focus of my research.