Ronishka Sabu Nalpathil is a Ph.D. in Architecture (PhD-Arch) student at Carnegie Mellon Architecture. She holds a master’s degree in Advanced Architectural Design from Cornell AAP (2024) and a Bachelor of Architecture degree with honors from Virginia Tech (2023). Her research attends to the ways colonial governance reconfigured ecologies, kinship, and domestic space in South India through the extraction of teak. Situated at the interstices of architecture, environmental history, and decolonial studies, her dissertation traces how forestry regimes, juridical instruments, and photographic practices rendered teak into an imperial ontology — mapped, measured and exhausted — while its depletion reconstituted the spatial order of the "nalukettu" and the matrilineal "taravad." By reading teak as both matter and mode of power, her work foregrounds the entangled violences of dispossession, ecological rupture, and kinship dislocation that sedimented under colonial and feudal dominion.