IAS Talk Pieces: Life in the Time of Coronavirus. #4 Survival Infrastructures

This is the fourth podcast in our series ‘Life in the Time of Coronavirus’ in which specialists from arts, humanities and social sciences, think about the questions that the virus poses to our ways of life, of being and self understanding, both now and in the past. In this contribution Ayona Datta, Professor of Human Geography at UCL, thinks about survival infrastructures in Calcutta and their collapse or dysfunctionality in the context of the mass exodus and precarity of migrant workers, forced to forsake the city because of India’s lockdown.

What comes into focus in her description is not only the failure of the city to support its vulnerable workers, but the way that the survival of the city depends on the bodies it betrays.

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• Music: smallhaus, Best of feelings and the BBC Sound Archive
• Producer and Editor: Albert Brenchat-Aguilar
• Communications: Patricia Mascarell Llombart
• Executive Producer: Tamar Garb