Exploring the Speculative City

Carol Upadhya is a social anthropologist and Honorary Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru, where she heads the Urban and Mobility Studies Programme. Her latest publication is Chronicles of a Global City: Speculative Lives and Unsettled Futures in Bengaluru (University of Minnesota Press, 2024; Yoda Press, 2025). She is the author of Reengineering India: Work, Capital, and Class in an Offshore Economy (OUP, 2016), and her forthcoming monograph on the Amaravati project will be published by Berghahn Books in 2026. She is also co-editor of the Journal of South Asian Development.

Swathi Shivanand is an interdisciplinary historian whose work spans urban, gender, labour, development, and regional histories. She is Assistant Professor at the Department of Liberal Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Bengaluru. Her research and teaching engage with questions of social change and urban transformation. She is a founding member of the Khidki Collective, a public history initiative exploring the intersections of memory, space, and storytelling.

Usha Rao is an anthropologist and independent media maker. Her feature-length documentary Our Metropolis (2014), co-directed with Gautam Sonti, traces the making of Bangalore as a “world-class” city and has been screened at festivals across India and abroad. Her sound installations have been presented at AIWART and other venues. Her doctoral research is a two-sited ethnography of Ulsoor’s Car Festival and the metro, exploring change and upheaval in urban neighbourhoods affected by infrastructure projects.

Bhargavi S. Rao works at the intersection of community action, law, policy, and practice, with over 25 years of experience in social and environmental justice. Her work connects climate change, livelihoods, and local governance through research, advocacy, and experiential learning. She has been deeply involved in strengthening community-led responses to environmental and social challenges across India and South Asia.

Janaki Nair was Professor of History at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her books include Women and Law in Colonial India (1996, revised 2025), Miners and Millhands (1998), The Promise of the Metropolis (2005), and Mysore Modern (2011). Her work has won the New India Foundation Book Prize. She has held visiting appointments and fellowships at the University of California, Berkeley, USA; Columbia University, USA; University of Wuerzburg, Germany;  German Historical Institute, London, UK; National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka, Japan; Azim Premji University, Bengaluru; and Cambridge University, UK. She has served on the Board of Governors, Institute for Social and Economic Change and on the Advisory Committee of the Karnataka State Education Commission (2023-25), and has been a member of the Kerala State Urban Policy Commission (2024-25).