03 July, 2025, 10:15 – 11:45 a.m., hybrid @IfEE & on zoom
The Lab welcomes Aseela Haque, a doctoral researcher at the Deapartment of Geography, Freie Universität Berlin, for her talk:
Interstitial ecologies: Everyday cosmopolitics of pigeon-human inhabitation in the urban margins
Focusing on road interstices in Karachi as sites of pigeon-human inhabitation, this article develops a more-than-human approach to understanding urban liminal or in-between spaces. Tracing interactions between humans and pigeons on urban roads and beyond, it highlights how animal movements knit together the city as an endless repository of anthropogenic liminal space and produce a new spatial topology in the makings of habitability. As such, this article brings into view the city as composed of edges, highlighting how human-animal relations in the urban margins produce space as relational, multiple, elastic, and porous. Writing towards interstitial ecologies or ecologies of the in-between, the article focuses on interconnected processes and practices in the makings of human and non-human cohabitation often in overlooked, marginal or in-between spaces, where human-built environment and non-human vitalities (animal, plant, microbial, divine) intertwine, offering new opportunities for co-living, encounter, and interaction. Drawing on ethnographic research in pigeon-feeding sites in Karachi, I reflect on various thresholds of in-betweenness; spatial, ecological, and corporeal that shape the makings of interstitial ecologies and cultivate grounds for ethical relations with non-human others.
Thursday, 3 July 2025, 10:15 – 11:45.
The session takes place at the Institute for European Ethnology, HU Berlin
& on Zoom
Everybody is very welcome!
For further information and the zoom link, please write milena.bister@hu-berlin.de