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Mobilizing Air: Cycling, Environmental Crisis, and Post-Carbon Futures

What political topographies does air pollution produce? How do bicyclists in large Asian cities experience, navigate, and mobilize air in their everyday lives? And what do these practices reveal about life amid environmental crises? Drawing on ethnographic research with cyclists and activists in Kolkata, this paper addresses these questions through the analytic of air politics: the multiple registers through which air is sensed, imagined, and mobilized as a political substance. I argue that, despite its apparent intangibility, air politics is profoundly terrestrial, constituted through urban infrastructures, labor regimes, and uneven geographies of exposure. Attending to everyday encounters with polluted air foregrounds how environmental crisis is lived, negotiated, and politicized in cities, while also illuminating the emergence of post-carbon imaginaries in the Anthropocene. In Kolkata, these dynamics are most sharply articulated in the frictions between economically marginalized cyclists, for whom the bicycle is integral to livelihood, and activists who frame cycling as a technology of health, sustainability, and climate mitigation. These uneven relations to air and mobility reveal how cycle politics both reproduces and unsettles existing social hierarchies, complicating the vehicle’s promise as a universal response to urban environmental crisis.

Speaker: Malini Sur, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Western Sydney University

Malini Sur is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Western Sydney University. Her research explores how political and climatic forces shape the mobility of people, goods, ideas, and technologies. She is the author of Jungle Passports: Fences, Mobility, and Citizenship at the Northeast India–Bangladesh Border (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), which received the President’s Book Prize (South Asian Studies Association of Australia), Bernard S. Cohn Book Prize (hon. mention), and a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. She has co-authored and co-edited five books and special issues on mobility, infrastructures, and repair, and published in leading journals including Cultural Anthropology, Comparative Studies in History and Society and Political and Legal Anthropology. She has served as President of the Australian Anthropological Society (2023–2024). Her documentary films (Life Cycle, 2016; Parramatta Redux, 2025) and photographic works have been screened and exhibited internationally. Her research has been supported by the Australian Research Council, Dutch Research Council, Singapore’s Ministry of Education, Chevening Scholarship, Tata Trusts, and the Parramatta Council.

Discussant: Roberto Rodríguez, Associate Researcher, CEE, Sciences Po

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