Nikhil Anand is an environmental anthropologist whose research focuses on cities, infrastructure, state power and climate change. He addresses these questions by studying the political ecology of cities, read through the different lives of water.
His award-winning first book, Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Politics in Mumbai (Duke University Press 2017), examines the everyday ways in which cities and citizens are made through the everyday management of water infrastructure. Articles based on this research have also been published in Antipode, City and Society, Cultural Anthropology, Ethnography and Public Culture. His essay, Leaky States: Water Audits, Ignorance and the Politics of Infrastructure, was awarded the Junior Scholar Prize by the Anthropology and Environment Society in 2014.
Following his interest in infrastructure studies in political anthropology, geography, and science and technology studies, Anand co-edited (with Hannah Appel and Akhil Gupta) The Promise of Infrastructure (Duke University Press 2018). The book shows how infrastructure provides a generative analytic and site to rethink questions of time, development and politics in different parts of the world.
His new book project, Urban Seas, is supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Penn Global Inquiries Fellowship. Based on field research with fishers, scientists and planners as they work in the sea, the book decenters the grounds of urban planning by drawing attention to the ways in which climate-changed seas are remaking coastal cities today.
Urban Seas also contributes to work in two collaborative research initiatives, Rising Waters and Inhabited Sea, for which Dr. Anand is the co-PI. Together with Bethany Wiggin (Penn Program in Environmental Humanities, co-PI), and Lalitha Kamath and Pranjal Deekshit (Tata Institute of Social Sciences), Rising Waters explores how climate change and urban redevelopment are recapitulating classed and raced vulnerabilities of marginalized residents in Philadelphia and Mumbai.
Inhabited Sea (with Anuradha Mathur, Co-PI) is a transdisciplinary research collaboration with architects, artists, citizen-scientists, oceanographers, social scientists, and urban planners working in Mumbai. The project proposes to reimagine the futures of coastal cities in the climate changed present, by attending to the ways in which built forms and more-than-human life inhabit wet terrain.
Anand has been a Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, a Quadrant Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Minnesota, and a Mellon Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. He has also received external grants from the Social Science Research Council, and the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe.