From the Convenors

We are pleased to share the Fall 2026 issue of the South Asian Urban Climates newsletter.

We are continuing to experiment with this as a space to update you on SAUC news, including the annual focus, workshops, and upcoming events, and to share what members have been up to.   

We are thrilled to announce that we received funding for 2026-27 from the Rock Ethics Institute at the Pennsylvania State University. This will support the development of this year’s case studies and help us continue to maintain the website. Additionally, we are also excited to welcome two graduate students, Archana Singh and Nethmi Bathige, PhD students at Penn State, as part of the SAUC team.

Thematic focus: Pedagogies for Collective Futures 

In 2026, we focus on the theme of Pedagogies for Collective Futures, focused on building knowledge, teaching, and fighting for and from South Asian cities. In the last two decades, South Asian cities have not only become important subjects and sites for global urban scholarship but also, in necessitating attention to caste, coloniality, embodiment, informality, citizenship, and everyday practice, have reshaped key theories of the urban. Meanwhile as flooding, heat, drought, air pollution, and other climate catastrophes unfold, questions of vulnerability and survival in the city have gained immediacy not only for research and planning, but in everyday life, learning, and labor. We ask contributors to think broadly and critically not only about work that positions the city as the site of climate’s colonial returns, but also, through empirically informed pedagogies, as the path out of them. 

We put out a call in May 2026, inviting contributors to share insights about experimental, community-centered, and climate-justice pedagogies that refuse the coloniality of disciplines, borders, and social categories. We have received several submissions, and organized panels to develop the case studies in November 2026. We have also organized a pre-conference symposium on the same topic at the Annual Conference on South Asia at Madison, Wisconsin in October 2026.

Panel 

We organized a panel at the 2026 meeting of the American Association of Geographers in San Francisco. Building on our 2025 theme on Weathering Extremes, the panel was titled Between world ending and world making: Politics of climate and urbanism in South Asia. In addition to Nida and Aparna, the panelists were Vinita Govindarajan, Anu Jogesh, Avia Nahreen, Deepti Chatti, and Asher Ghertner.

In recent years, colonial and neo-colonial practices wring extreme weather into shape for their own ends, which, in South Asian cities translate into sustainability-sanctioned land grabs, crackdowns on environmental and other activism, new forms of climate vulnerability for marginalized laborers, and more. Recognizing these concerns, SAUC’s 2026 panel elicited discussion about and across the historic and geographic specificities that shape how projects of development, extraction, and climate-making materialize, and the place-making practices that might otherwise fall away. 

Member news

Gideon Thomas Mathson completed fieldwork for the CSDS Science, Technology and Democracy Fellowship, examining the summer of 2026 and lived thermal experiences in Delhi. The fellowship runs from December 2025 to December 2026. Additionally, along with Dr. Deepak Prince and Dr. Mohammed Saeed, he was awarded a Wenner-Gren Global Initiatives Grant on August 31 for Tent Anthropology Presents: Existential Cartographies of a Thermodynamic Planet. The project will examine thermal conditions and adaptation across ten Tier 2 Indian cities during the summers of 2027 and 2028.

Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi shares the launch of Cohabitations, a new University of Minnesota Press book series exploring the interdependencies of built environments and constructed ecologies. The series invites SAUC members to submit monographs.
https://www.upress.umn.edu/announcing-a-new-series-cohabitations/

Indivar Jonnalagadda published “How India’s Urban Lake Policies Are Getting It Wrong” in The India Forum, examining Hyderabad’s lakes and calling for a democratic, community-oriented approach to ecological repair.
https://www.theindiaforum.in/environment/how-indias-urban-lake-policies-are-getting-it-wrong

On the horizon

We have organized a pre-conference symposium on the theme Pedagogies for Collective Futures on Wednesday October 28, at the 2026 meeting of the Annual Conference on South Asia at Madison, Wisconsin. If you are going to be at the conference, please drop by!

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