Mukul Kumar

Disassembling Coal: Finance Capital, Land, and Environmental Justice in South India

Lecture by Mukul Kumar, Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Public Policy at the University of California, Irvine.

This lecture will be presented virtually, please register in advance for the Zoom webinar link.

Over the last three decades of liberalization, India’s coal industry has been transformed from a state-owned monopoly into a vast assemblage of parastatal and multinational corporations. Drawing upon the case of how one of the largest proposed coal-fired power plants in south India has been disassembled, this talk calls for an analysis of the instabilities and limits of global fossil fuel industries. The talk examines how a range of conjunctural events and elements—from unruly legal disputes over land to the materiality and price of imported coal—have led to the fracturing of emergent coal infrastructures. Such processes of disassembling coal have implications for broader discussions of environmental justice within the context of global forms of energy and financial extraction.

Organized by the PhD students in the Urban Planning Program at Columbia GSAPP. Free and open to the public.

Virtual events hosted on Zoom Webinar do not require an account to attend, advanced registration is encouraged. GSAPP is committed to providing universal access to all of our virtual events. Please contact up@arch.columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.