Seminar #1: Hoofprints in the City: Articulating More-than-human Mobilities

How might the rhythms of a city be felt and articulated? What happens when the urban fabric is composed through tracks and trails involving both humans and other-than-humans? How might this enable us to write the city differently—methodologically and theoretically—from the (im)mobilities and movements of bovines?

A visible and common occurrence on the streets of Delhi is that of bovines. Tied to small-scale dairies which dot the urban landscape, bovines, particularly cattle, are typically left astray between the two milking periods. During this time, bovines create and craft a rout(in)e for themselves, based on places, infrastructures, humans and nonhuman others they come to associate with food, rest, care, and shelter. Resting on footpaths, foraging on food provisioned at traffic signal islands, ruminating under a tree cover in a government housing colony—constitute the heterogenous spaces, practices, and relations that emerge as bovines move, inhabit, and common the urban landscape. Thus,…