Entangled Ecologies as Metaphors of State Design

This book takes a unique approach to the ethnographic and analytical explorations of ecologies in the making. This work is marked out by careful enquiry on ecologies in the making with the backdrop of distinct regional developmentalist trajectories as well as specific ethnography from Kerala, South-West India. This book takes a unique approach to the ethnographic and analytical explorations of ecologies as entangled in their makings. It positions its arguments through emerging anthropocene contexts as entanglements across hybrid ecologies that unravel. The subsumed relationships between actors and the unprecedented interactions across the human and non-human entities brings up unique problematics. The book depends on existing literature, ethnographic work, and the close introspection of immediate geographies interspersed with the pertinent debates. Reconfiguration of relationships through changing orders and regimes towards the neo-liberal global moments of places manifest as matters of designs and demarcations. The chapters point at the often-unintended outcomes of such designs as it becomes evident from the meandering rivers, rains, wetlands, unprecedented floods, invasive ecologies, and ‘encounters’ with the wild. This work is a careful enquiry into ecologies in the making through ethnographies from Kerala, South-West India.​ Mathew A Varghese is Assistant Professor at the School of International Relations and Politics (SIRP) at the Mahatma Gandhi University in Kerala, India. Varghese’s research interests are in ecological relationships, animal-human interactions and urban processes. Previously a fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS), Varghese is affiliated as a researcher with Urban Enclaving Futures, Bergen and the Algorithmic Governance Research Network, Oslo. He is also the Hon. Director of the Centre for Urban Studies (CUS) at the M G University.