Sensing Chennai from the Air with Barad

This paper offers a relational strategy for approaching the urban as elemental, focusing on the airs of Chennai in south India. It contributes to the field of elemental urbanism, which is concerned with how earthly forces pervade and come to matter in and shape contemporary cities. It approaches these questions through a performative, Baradian methodology, whose analytical starting point is the author’s immersion in Chennai’s airs, from which what unfolds is then traced.