Amid endless wars, authoritarianism, neocolonialism, and displacement, millions are being uprooted, while pervasive uncertainty grips millions more. As the world is remade through what some have described as neo-illiberalism, the very façade of humanitarianism, and indeed the boundaries of who counts as human, is beginning to unravel. Contemporary capitalism, imperialism, and colonial power produce vast populations whose lives are treated as disposable, surplus, or expendable. Yet the social worlds, forms of care, survival practices, and creative capacities of these populations continually exceed such imposed disposability. To understand the present conjuncture, we must attend to the “life-times” of migrants, informal workers, slum dwellers, and other populations rendered surplus by dominant political and economic orders.
This episode brings together two scholars whose work has grappled with these questions in profound ways. At the same time, the humanitarian incorporation of displaced populations into conditions of permanent temporariness is not outside history. Refugee camps and other spaces of displacement are complex built environments with their own material, social, and political histories. Using Remaindered Life and Architecture of Migration as heuristics, our guests explore the political imaginaries animated by these influential books and reflect on their relevance to the current conjuncture. In doing so, they situate contemporary forms of displacement, disposability, and humanitarian governance within the enduring palimpsest of colonial pasts.
Additional links:
Remaindered Life (Duke University Press, 2022) – https://www.dukeupress.edu/remaindered-life
Discourse on Imperialism (University of the Philippines Press, 2025) – https://press.up.edu.ph/product/discourse-on-imperialism/
Anti-Colonial Planetary Struggle: History, Humans, and Us (Bristol University Press, 2025) – https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/edcollchap-oa/book/9781529245547/ch007.xml?rskey=xror0y&result=3
Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (Duke University Press, Theory in Forms) available open access – https://dukeupress.edu/architecture-of-migration
This episode was edited and posted by Anne Goßler.
Guests:
Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi
Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi is an art and architectural historian specializing in histories of modernity, migration, and settlement. She is an Associate Professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, and her writing and teaching builds on yearslong research in Africa, Asia, and Europe for two scholarly monographs, Architecture of Migration (Duke University Press) and Ecologies of the Past.
These two projects inform her research on histories of architecture, craft, settlement, and land, experiences of migration and territorial partition, and knowledge of the past through architectural practice, pedagogy, and discourse on the African continent and South Asian subcontinent. For more, please see https://www.anooradhaiyersiddiqi.net/
Neferti X.M. Tadiar
Neferti X.M. Tadiar is an interdisciplinary, postcolonial Filipina feminist scholar of cultural practice, social imagination, and global political economy based in New York City. She is the author of Remaindered Life (2022); Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization (2009); and Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (2004). Her most recent books are Discourse on Imperialism (2025) and At the Edges of Command: Conversations and Reflections on Remaindered Life (2026). She is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University and Director of the Alfredo F. Tadiar Library.
Host:
Nitin Bathla
Nitin Bathla is a transdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection of urbanization, the environment, society, and the arts. He holds a Doctorate in Urban Studies from ETH Zurich and is currently jointly affiliated with ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich. He is the author of the award-winning book Researching Otherwise: Pluriversal Methods for Urban and Landscape Studies and the critically acclaimed documentary Not Just Roads.
Nitin serves as an editor for the journal Urban Geography and the Urban Political Podcast, and sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Urban Political Ecology and Shared Habitats. His current research focuses on the political ecology of nocturnal urbanization and public illumination in Switzerland.