Ashima Mittal

ASHIMA MITTAL, then a graduate student at University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, received funding in April 2022 to aid research on “Making Air Breathable: Experimental Ecologies of ‘Clean’ Tech in India,” supervised by Dr. Joseph P. Masco. From June 2022 to July 2023, this project tracked the imperialist formations of technoscientific capital in India in the wake of managing its air pollution crises. India, the country with one of the most polluted atmospheres on the planet, is becoming a hub for global investment in “clean” tech projects in the wake of managing its proliferating air pollution crisis. Through emergent vistas of green finance, atmospheric engineering, and speculative design, air pollution zones in the country are being transformed into ‘experimental ecologies’ to produce new visions of economic growth and environmental management. This research studied ongoing projects at three critical sites of technoscientific research, industrial production, and implementation: public-private R&D labs, clean-tech startups, and manufacturing units respectively. Through a historical and ethnographic study of these projects, the research tracked the transformation of air pollution from an environmental problem to a business opportunity in these projects. It followed the internal contradictions and forms of negotiations that emerge between the different stakeholders and experts claiming to solve this scalar problem. Lastly, it focused on practices of environmentalism and political futurities that become available through projects of producing breathable air in India and the possibilities for human-environmental relationships that emerge through them.