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Animating Construction: Animal Labour and Urban Architectures of Violence

RSVP forthcoming. 

This in-person lecture is part of the Spring 2026 Sciame Lecture Series, "The Elephant in the Room: Locating Animal Lives in Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes."

Yamini Narayanan (she/her) is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and an Associate Professor of International Development at Deakin University, Melbourne. Yamini's research intersects animal, political, and environmental geography, multispecies ethnography, South Asian studies, animal labour, and animals and geopolitics. She is the author of the multi-award-winning Mother Cow, Mother India (Stanford, 2023). Her current research focuses on animals in coercive labour in illegal global production chains, particularly in India’s construction sector. She is a lifelong Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, an honour that is conferred through nomination or invitation only.

"Animating Construction: Animal Labour and Urban Architectures of Violence": To more fully comprehend the animalities composing contemporary urbanisms, we must confront the animal labour sustaining global construction - those upon whose backs’ cities are literally constructed. This lecture examines animals conscripted into coercive labour at the frontiers of brick production in South Asia. Bricks are, at once, foundational to civilization and politically neutralized. Thus, an analysis that politicizes the violence of their making unsettles the very bedrock of human civilisation. Focusing on India’s peri-urban brick kilns, sites of extreme human poverty and ecological devastation, it shows how criminalized economies sustain global construction through the maintenance of ‘low-value’ human-animal labour relations, where human precarity demands extreme extractions from animal bodies. Yet amid these conditions, fragile but radical visions of alternative worlds emerge. The lecture closes by imagining an animals’ ecological politics that safeguards sovereign animal-nature relations as integral to renewed urban infrastructural futures.

Suggested Reading: Narayanan, Yamini. "Animal Suffering in Global Development and Antipoverty Praxis: Enforced Animal Labor in the Peripheral Capitalism of Indian Brick Kilns." Annals of the American Association of Geographers 114, no. 9 (2024): 2068–2084.

"The Elephant in the Room: Locating Animal Lives in Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes" takes its title from the expression “the elephant in the room,” which originates in the Russian author Ivan Krylov’s 1814 fable “The Inquisitive Man.” In the story, a visitor to a natural history museum becomes so enthralled with countless “birds and beasts” that he overlooks the largest of them all: a colossal elephant. As the expression gained currency, any reference to real animals gave way to metaphorical ones. The spring 2026 Sciame lecture series takes the idiom literally by addressing the common failure to notice all animals in the built environment. In the lecture series, scholars, designers, thinkers, and activists cast light on imagining, designing, and sharing buildings, cities, and landscapes with other species.

Making space for animals in the built environment often requires diverting attention away from our human perspective and desires, thus troubling our own anthropocentrism and claims about human exceptionalism. More often than not, the built environment creates antagonistic, if not deadly, conditions for animals. Ballooning construction campaigns, invasive resource extraction for building materials, and hermetically sealed structures have all decimated animal habitats and killed countless animals. Given the planetary threats of diminishing biodiversity, the climate crisis, and health emergencies, recentering animal lives and human-animal relationships in the built environment is critical to the survival of all animal life.

All lectures are free, open to the public, and held in the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture Sciame Auditorium. For live captioning, ASL interpretation, or access requests, please contact ssadean@ccny.cuny.edu.

This lecture series is made possible by the Spitzer Architecture Fund and the generous support of Frank Sciame ’74, CEO of Sciame Construction.

Sciame Auditorium (Room 107) 141 Convent Avenue New York, NY 10031

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