The Watery Scales of Depth

Keywords: Coastline, Climate change, Dredging, Depth, Industrial
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 14

Abstract

At Ennore, a coastal district in Chennai city, water depth is in crisis. Industrial effluents released by coal power plants and factories along the shore have steadily flattened the Ennore creek over five decades of postcolonial industrial development. A coastal engineering practice called dredging has emerged as a solution for the near-term survival of the creek, the livelihoods of fishers, and the continued industrial expansion. The crisis in water depth at the Ennore creek holds together the continued flattening of water into land, and the dredging of water for depth.

Though the crisis in Ennore is local to the waters of the creek, it is also connected to other waters and histories. Ennore’s industrial coast is one part of a larger Coromandel coastline which is marked by seawalls, ports and other engineering interventions across colonial and postcolonial periods. These coastal waters of the Bay of Bengal are changing drastically due to sea-level rise and are emerging as important sites where the impacts of global climate change are realized. Building on feminist scholarship, I examine how the shifting depth of the Ennore creek provokes conceptual questions of what are the temporal and spatial limits of depth. How is “depth” delineated as an empirical and analytical object by scholars and coastal publics? What histories and spatial scales emerge as relevant in conceptualizing a crisis of depth?