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Ayush Biswas

a.biswas@em.uni-frankfurt.de

Short Vita
Ayush Biswas is a research associate and a doctoral candidate in the DFG funded research training group-Fixing Futures: investigating technologies of anticipation in contemporary societies. He has previously worked as a research and partnership associate at various Multi-Modal psychotherapeutic pracitces, both in Germany and India. He has previously received a MA in 2020 studying Political Sciences and International Relations from Jadavpur University, Kolkata and is expected to recieve another MA in Science and Technology Studies from Goethe University, Frankfurt. His research interests include Post-Actor Network Theory, Subaltern Geographies and Geo-Philosophy.

Project Description
Ayush Biswas’s research project engages with ethno-historical modes of interacting with, documenting, and sensing seismic worlds within the Himalayan Cryosphere. Communities and experts have long inhabited and worked within the unstable vertical terrain of the Lesser Himalayas, where precarity is both an everyday condition and a historical constant. Although this vulnerability has been scientifically recorded, it has often been ignored in the implementation of trans-regional mobility and energy infrastructures. The cumulative effects of such anthropogenic interventions on already unstable ground have led to a slow-moving crisis in one Himalayan township, which has been subsiding at an average rate of 6.5 cm per year since the beginning of this decade.

Through archival research and multi-modal ethnography, the project traces how past and present forms of witnessing, measurement, and intervention converge around this instability. It explores how particular terrains and temporalities are rendered visible, actionable, and worth salvaging, while others recede into the background of governance. Rather than framing disaster as rupture, the project conceptualizes it as a gradual negotiation of value—where matter, memory, and mobility are unevenly distributed. In this context, the project asks how distinctions between vitality and inertia, relevance and residue, shape the thresholds of anticipation, evidence and abandonment in contemporary disaster geographies.