Drawing Coastlines (working title) is about how technoscientific images create coasts and coastal futures. It is based on ethnographic research in Mumbai and follows surveyors, planners, fishing communities, amateur meteorologists, and marine life advocates, and the maps, plans, infographics, statistical figures, and visual archives they create. While an overwhelming number of images create coasts where futures are foreshortened and given over to development, Drawing Coastlines argues that images and acts of drawing them are paths toward a critical climate politics.
The book makes this argument by interlacing comics and text: it deconstructs and reconstructs scientific images and the technologies, practices, and choices that go into making them, as well as the ways in which they are seen, performed, and manifest. The book’s multimodal format demonstrates how images materialize landscapes in complex and contradictory ways, and the possibilities they offer for building new forms of care in the midst of crisis.
V. Chitra 2022