theworkroomofchan
PUBLICATIONS
Bain, A. L., Podmore, J. A., & Arun-Pina, C. (2023). CONCLUSION: RECONFIGURING URBAN CULTURAL INFRASTRUCTURE. In A. L. BAIN & J. A. PODMORE (Eds.), The Cultural Infrastructure of Cities (pp. 243–258). Agenda Publishing. http://www.jstor.org/stable/jj.4688122.23
I took on the role of an artist-scholar for the edited collection where I was first commissioned to envision and create original artwork for each sections as they come together into the entirety of the edited book by visualizing the contributing authors' theoretical arguments and key analytical observations of their respective chapters. Much like the anthology itself, the artwork I created for each section also come together as a polyptych, "Reconfiguring urban cultural infrastructure: a polyptych in flux (2022): from producing to performing to consuming to collecting to (re)producing culture" (p. 245), visualizing editors' vision and structural framework. I was then invited by the editors as an artist-author to contribute to the concluding chapter my artist statement. In taking a pathbreaking step towards hybrid scholarships, the text was opened to both the artist-in-collaboration and the visual artwork.
Commissioned Concept Artwork
Podmore, J. A., Bain, A.L., and Arun-Pina, C. 2022. LGBTQ+ Urban Social Worlds. In A. L. Bain, A. L. and Peake, L. (Eds.) Urbanization in a Global Context. Second edition. Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford
University Press. Print.
In this comparative queer urbanism chapter with the case studies of Paris, New Delhi and Montreal, drawing from my own doctoral research, I contribute the case study of off-campus student accommodations in the North Campus district, University of Delhi in the aspiring global city of New Delhi, India. I analyse the Common Wealth Games (CWG 2010) megasport event that led to the student evictions by the university administration and exploitation by neighbourhood landowners. While the displacement of several migrant and urban poor famililes has been heavily researched and reported, student evictions is not. With a particular focus on the student housing typologies of Paying Guest accommodations (PGs) and shared private rental housing that most often than not reproduce cis-heteropatriarchal marital family domestic codes, the case study raises important question about the normative neglect towards the student displacement.
Abstract Urban Landscape Painting
Arun-Pina, C. (2023). “Homonegative Labyrinth of Representational Distortions: Planning Im/Possibilities for Higher Education LGBTQ+ Students in Mumbai.” Urban planning 8.2S1: 150–163. Web. https://doi.org/10.17645/up.v8i2.6311
In this article, I analyse the yet amiss spatial stories of LGBTQ+ postsecondary students in India germinating the mutually feeding phenomena of "Student phobia" and "Cis-Heteronormative Familification" to counter the Anglo-American terminology of "Studentification", and as indispensable concepts to fully analyse the town-and-gown and its role in shaping student housing. Is there an unchecked correlation between studentphobia and homo/queer/transphobia? Case study of TISS, Mumbai, India reveals the normativity underlying the question of belonging (and dysphoria).
Spatio-Visual Artwork
Arun-Pina, C. (2021). "Micro-liminal Spaces of (Mis)Gendering: The Critical Potential of Trans-Pedagogy in Post-Secondary Institutions." ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 20(5), 509–530. Retrieved from https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1901
Ask not just what could trans-pedagogy look like, but where can and does trans-pedagogy thrive? A trans question is invariably a spatial, a locational question.
Spatio-Visual Artwork
Arun-Pina, Chan. “Autoethnographic Re-Drawings of Floating Homes: Narrating Trans Experiences of Rental Homes in Bangalore.” Emotion, Space and Society 40 (2021): 100807-. Web. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2021.100807
Almost two decades ago, queer geographers Brown and Knopp confronted the methodological challenge: how to "represent the unrepresentable". In this article I utilize trans-disciplinary tools and rework conventional disciplinary boundaries to offer Autoethnographic Re-drawing (AErD) as a critical geographical method of representing the muted, invisibilized, and affective dimensions of queer and trans lived and felt experiences of rental housing. I further offer the theoretical formulation of "trans subjects" to consider both floating population and/in floating homes, rarely studied within queer geographies of homes literature. This article then, at once offers critical spatial, temporal, and global south lens to critical geographies of homes scholarship.
Spatio-Visual Artwork
Bain, A.L. and Arun-Pina, C. 2020. Masculinism. In A. Kobayashi (ed) International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, Volume 2. Oxford: Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-102295-5.10280-X
Abstract: The origin of geographical interest in gender can be traced back to research by feminist geographers in the mid-1970s. Subsequent scholarly interest specifically on the male gender was given theoretical support by critical interdisciplinary research in men's studies, which helped to diversify the kinds of questions that geographers asked and the range of masculinities that geographers studied. In tandem with a significant body of research on the geography of masculinities that had developed by the turn of the 21st century, came an interest, particularly by feminist scholars, in the male dominance of the geographical tradition. Within feminist critiques of the discipline of geography, the term masculinism has been used to refer to pervasive patriarchal ideologies of masculine cultural dominance that have influenced the ways in which knowledge is constructed and research is undertaken. An examination of masculinist research practice in geography reveals that the methodologies used to study men and masculinities are not particularly distinctive or original, and, in large part, these methodologies have not been critically interrogated or problematized by scholars.
3-dimensional visualization of "Comparative cultural quarter embeddedness: top view and isometric view AutoCAD technical drawings created by Arun-Pina, C for Authors: Bain, A.L. and Landau, F. 2021. Generationing cultural quarters: the temporal embeddedness of relational places, Urban Geography, DOI: 10.1080/02723638.2021.1940446
I first attended the authors' presentation of their 2019 article, an ongoing research project at the time, as part of the graduate colloquium at York University. While listening to the authors speak about developing the--2-dimensional--POSES Star Framework as an analytical tool to map the temporal embeddedness, I visualized the Star tool as in fact a 3-dimensional entity where the five triangles would act as wings to the pentagonal center, somewhat like the Golden Snitch--the ball with wings. Adding the vertical third dimension would rework the flatness of a 2-dimensional diagram while offering the space to map the depth of embeddedness in the spatio-temporal matrix. I sketched the diagram into a model, and proposed to develop the 3-dimensional Star tool to the authors who then promptly commissioned me to create original concept artwork for their then forthcoming Urban Geography article as part of their research project.
Commissioned Concept Artwork
Arun-Pina, Chan. 2022. “Book Review: Michele Lancione & Colin McFarlane, Global Urbanism: Knowledge, Power and the City.” Urbanisation: 214–217. Web.
Writing this book review gave me the opportunity to devise a spatio-temporal dial that can be employed as a research analytical, pedagogical, as well as an editorial tool. The linear displacement in the dial cuts across different spatial scales, the angular displacement represents a cross-section of urban issues at different temporal scales and/or frequency of occurrences. Contributing chapters can be mapped onto the dial by students, professors, and editors of urban studies to comprehensively visualize scholarly interventions.
