Using Sex as an Archive of the city: New Insights into understanding Urban sexual Geographies from Global South Perspective
Funding period: 1 February 2023 – 31 October 2023
Type of funding:
International Fellowship
Dr. Dhiren Borisa is a Dalit queer activist, poet, and an urban sexual geographer, and is currently employed as Assistant Professor at Jindal Global Law school, India. He is also an honorary visiting fellow at School of Geography, Geology and Environment at University of Leicester, UK. Dr. Borisa attained his PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi on Queer Cartographies of Desires in Delhi. His research engages with sexual mappings and makings of cities from an intersectional and decolonial lens both among queer spaces in India and in diasporic queer worldings.
As a USF International fellow, Dr. Borisa will spend nine months working with Prof. Gavin Brown at the Department of Geography, The University of Sheffield.
This fellowship will allow him to develop his doctoral research into a monograph, which foregrounds city making through Dalit and queer experiences in India. As a first-generation learner, queer, and member of a historically caste oppressed community, his book is uniquely positioned to bring a fresh critical perspective to urban theorizing from the Global South. As an auto-ethnographic storytelling of the city, his research articulates innovative ways of envisioning worlding by using the register of the sexual and the ways in which it is constituted, transacted, and sequestered in the city fabric. Locating the queer peripheries in terms of the city’s unwanted across the axes of geography, caste, class, religion and sexuality, his work provides new insights around queerness and Southern Urban theory.
As part of the USF Fellowship, Dr. Borisa also received a USF Knowledge Mobilisation Award in April 2024 (see below).
USF Knowledge Mobilisation Award: Making Cities Liveable: Caste, Queerness and City-making through stories of everyday resilience in India
Making Cities Liveable: Caste, Queerness and City-making through stories of everyday resilience in India is a collaboration of Dr. Borisa with Prateek Draik, Rishabh Arora, and Dhrubo Jyoti along with Project Mukti.
The project wonders, “How to tell stories of our cities?” According to the team, messy lives and practices draw our messy geographies. Mapping through the intersections of queerness, caste, and urban making, Making Cities Liveable intends to work with around 12-15 Dalit queer, activists, artists, scholars, and city dwellers. The team will brainstorm together more creative ways of undoing the constrained disciplinary frames to develop more life-enhancing, interdisciplinary ways of approaching urban studies by channelizing radical queer, feminist and decolonial methodologies. For them, the project aims to co-create a zine of auto-ethnographic story telling which can be shared with community organizers and activists.
Making Cities Liveable: Caste, Queerness and City-making through stories of everyday resilience in India states that cities are not just concrete and infrastructures, but contested Cartographies of our desires and aspirations. The only way to survive a big city is to then fictionalize it — make it our own – wrap it in our stories. This project engages with sex as an archive of reading the city for the multitudes that are peripheralised through caste, class, religion and sexualities in India.
This project proposes storytelling as urban making and a step towards decolonizing our cities. It has two components:
1) it intends to enhance the value and reach of an ongoing work on a USF funded monograph, by going beyond the textual to turn it into more than just text – a visual storytelling.
2) the project envisages to disseminate research findings and methodological interventions through storytelling workshops with marginalised caste and queer communities in Delhi and around.
The aim is to engage with and empower communities to co-create urban knowledges and read urban as messy texts. The purpose is to create a zine of auto-ethnographic story telling which can be shared with community organizers and activists. The proposed workshops will both methodologically equip the participants to map their own urban worlds, but hope, will allow to disseminate these knowledges and methods beyond this cohort and into the communities.