With the “Hear, Here” series, we aim to facilitate conversations around new research in the humanities. Faculty fellows at the Institute for the Humanities will discuss a part of their current project in a short talk followed by a Q & A session.

About this talk:
This talk explores how the bodies and behaviors of two Sunni Muslim men and a purple heron (Ardea purpurea) are periodically entangled as they work together at the threshold of their unassuming dwelling at Poa Mecca to make vessels from scrap metal gathered from a booming metropolis in Assam, India and explicates how their labor disrupts old ideologies and allows them to navigate new positionalities as geomorphologies shift and political currents change.

Nachiket Chanchani is a 2025-26 Helmut F. Stern Faculty Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities and Associate Professor of History of Art.