BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//wp-events-plugin.com//7.2.3.1//EN TZID:America/New_York X-WR-TIMEZONE:America/New_York BEGIN:VEVENT UID:760@ssa.ccny.cuny.edu DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20260312T173000 DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20260312T190000 DTSTAMP:20260126T233420Z URL:https://ssa.ccny.cuny.edu/events/spring-2026-sciame-lecture-series-yam ini-narayanan/ SUMMARY:Spring 2026 Sciame Lecture Series: Yamini Narayanan DESCRIPTION:Please RSVP \nThis in-person lecture is part of the Spring 202 6 Sciame Lecture Series\, "The Elephant in the Room: Locating Animal Lives in Buildings\, Cities\, and Landscapes."\n\nYamini Narayanan (she/her) is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and an Associate Professor o f International Development at Deakin University\, Melbourne. Yamini's res earch intersects animal\, political\, and environmental geography\, multis pecies ethnography\, South Asian studies\, animal labour\, and animals and geopolitics. She is the author of the multi-award-winning Mother Cow\, Mo ther India (Stanford\, 2023). Her current research focuses on animals in c oercive labour in illegal global production chains\, particularly in India ’s construction sector. She is a lifelong Fellow of the Oxford Centre fo r Animal Ethics\, an honour that is conferred through nomination or invita tion only.\n\n"Animating Construction: Animal Labour and Urban Architectur es of Violence": To more fully comprehend the animalities composing contem porary urbanisms\, we must confront the animal labour sustaining global co nstruction - those upon whose backs’ cities are literally constructed. T his lecture examines animals conscripted into coercive labour at the front iers of brick production in South Asia. Bricks are\, at once\, foundationa l to civilization and politically neutralized. Thus\, an analysis that pol iticizes the violence of their making unsettles the very bedrock of human civilisation. Focusing on India’s peri-urban brick kilns\, sites of extr eme human poverty and ecological devastation\, it shows how criminalized e conomies sustain global construction through the maintenance of ‘low-val ue’ human-animal labour relations\, where human precarity demands extrem e extractions from animal bodies. Yet amid these conditions\, fragile but radical visions of alternative worlds emerge. The lecture closes by imagin ing an animals’ ecological politics that safeguards sovereign animal-nat ure relations as integral to renewed urban infrastructural futures.\n\nSug gested Reading: Narayanan\, Yamini. "Animal Suffering in Global Developmen t and Antipoverty Praxis: Enforced Animal Labor in the Peripheral Capitali sm of Indian Brick Kilns." Annals of the American Association of Geographe rs 114\, no. 9 (2024): 2068–2084.\n\n"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 R ussian 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 t o real animals gave way to metaphorical ones. The spring 2026 Sciame lectu re series takes the idiom literally by addressing the common failure to no tice all animals in the built environment. In the lecture series\, scholar s\, designers\, thinkers\, and activists cast light on imagining\, designi ng\, and sharing buildings\, cities\, and landscapes with other species.\n \nMaking space for animals in the built environment often requires diverti ng 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\, c onditions for animals. Ballooning construction campaigns\, invasive resour ce 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 relationshi ps in the built environment is critical to the survival of all animal life .\n\nAll lectures are free\, open to the public\, and held in the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture Sciame Auditorium. For live captio ning\, ASL interpretation\, or access requests\, please contact ssadean@cc ny.cuny.edu.\n\nThis lecture series is made possible by the Spitzer Archit ecture Fund and the generous support of Frank Sciame ’74\, CEO of Sciame Construction. CATEGORIES:Events,Lectures,Sciame Lectures LOCATION:Sciame Auditorium (Room 107)\, 141 Convent Avenue\, New York\, NY\ , 10031\, United States GEO:40.8177595;-73.95047339999996 X-APPLE-STRUCTURED-LOCATION;VALUE=URI;X-ADDRESS=141 Convent Avenue\, New Yo rk\, NY\, 10031\, United States;X-APPLE-RADIUS=100;X-TITLE=Sciame Auditori um (Room 107):geo:40.8177595,-73.95047339999996 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/New_York X-LIC-LOCATION:America/New_York BEGIN:DAYLIGHT DTSTART:20260308T030000 TZOFFSETFROM:-0500 TZOFFSETTO:-0400 TZNAME:EDT END:DAYLIGHT END:VTIMEZONE END:VCALENDAR