Events

PROGRAM

Life Cycle explores the place of the bicycle in the everyday lives of city dwellers in Kolkata, eastern India. Winding through Kolkata’s roads we follow the city’s daily wage-workers, teachers and environmentalists and their changing relationships to cycling. Are Kolkata’s bicycles relics of a past to be hastily discarded or are they viable, if complicated cargo vehicles in India’s burgeoning cities? What happens when new traffic regulations impede two-wheeled travelers from riding on Kolkata’s roads? How do vendors, couriers, newspaper sellers and artists negotiate Kolkata’s roads congested with cars and other motorized transport? Who wins the battle for the road – the bicycle or the car?

Life Cycle is a tribute to the bicycle in uncertain times; and its relationship to rapidly changing cities (42 minutes). To watch the trailer, please click here.

| Direction: Malini Sur | Camera: Debalina | Additional Camera: Sabyasachi Bannerjee | Sound: Sabyasachi Pal | Editing: Sumit Ghosh | Sound Design: Aparna Das | Re-recording: Abdul Rajjak |

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Joseph ALTER is Professor of Anthropology at the Yale-NUS College. He earned concurrent BA/MA degrees in Anthropology from Wesleyan University in 1982 and a PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989. He has taught at Kalamazoo College, Western Michigan University, Goshen College and the University of Pittsburgh. In conjunction with teaching and research focused on South Asia, Professor Alter is the academic director of a Yale-NUS CIPE semester study abroad programme based in the Himalayas of North India.

Tara M. DANKEL recently moved to SUTD from Harvard University, where she received her doctoral degree. Her dissertation, “To Become Again What We Never Were: Foucault and the Politics of Transformation,” strategizes ways for environmental activism to achieve radical personal and societal change by using a Foucauldian narrative of ethical subject formation to interrogate the assumptions concerning human subjectivity that underlie American environmentalism. Current research interests include ecological urbanism, the ethical implications of built environments, food systems, pop culture, the ethics of everyday life, pragmatism, and gender and sexuality studies.

LIN Weiqiang is Assistant Professor at the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore. He graduated from Royal Holloway, University of London with a PhD in geography in 2014 under the supervision of Tim Cresswell and Peter Adey. Weiqiang was a recipient of the UK Commonwealth Scholarship and was on a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto, working on critical logistics with Deborah Cowen. His research interests lie at the intersection of mobilities and infrastructures, air transport, human migration and transnationalism.

Fiona LEE is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Cultural Studies at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. She earned her PhD in English and Women’s Studies at The Graduate Center, City University of New York in 2014. Her research examines the history of 20th-century decolonization in Southeast Asia through the prisms of literature and the arts.

Malini SUR is an anthropologist and holds a fellowship at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Her research interests connect three broad areas — borders, mobility, and citizenship — with a focus on South Asia. She has lectured at the University of Amsterdam and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto. Malini’s fieldwork photographs on South Asian borderlands have been exhibited in Amsterdam, Berlin, Bonn, Chiang Mai, Heidelberg, Kathmandu and Munich. Life Cycle is her first ethnographic documentary.

REGISTRATION
Admission is free, and seats are available on a first-come, first-served basis. We greatly appreciate it if you click on the “Register” button above to RSVP.