As part of SLARG’s Research Week programme, and in conjunction with the exhibition opening and PhD defense of SLARG researcher Danial Shah, we are pleased to welcome Dr. Natasha Raheja (Cornell University) for a talk and screening. Dr. Raheja will also take part in Shah’s doctoral defense.

In this talk, Raheja presents her use of formal filmic techniques to advance a visual argument about mobility and borders in South Asia. While borders are often made visible through familiar representations—maps, fences, walls, passports, and news coverage—her work asks what happens when the narrative is shuffled. By splicing, juxtaposing, and recombining images of borders, Raheja disrupts figurative absorption and shows how the India–Pakistan border is not only a site of division but also a continuous space of encounter.

Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in the Thar Desert region, she will screen and discuss two works:

• A Gregarious Species (2023, 9 min): An experimental found-footage film that weaves together mobile phone videos of transboundary locust swarms, political rallies, and scientific webinars. The film highlights the selective porosity of borders amidst environmental crisis, farmer insecurity, and rising nationalism in South Asia.
• Kitne Passports? (in production, 15 min sample): A work-in-progress that follows four cross-caste Pakistani Hindu migrant families as they shift between minority and majority status, navigating uncertain futures in India.

Through montage, glitch, and split-screen techniques, Raheja explores how visual media itself can unsettle fixed imaginaries of the border, revealing both its ruptures and continuities.

About the speaker
Natasha Raheja is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Performing & Media Arts at Cornell University. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from NYU and degrees in Biology and Asian Languages and Literature (Urdu focus) from UT Austin. Her films and writings engage migration, belonging, and majority–minority politics in South Asia. She is the director of Cast in India, a portrait of the Bengali metal workers who manufacture New York City manhole covers, and her forthcoming book Selective Welcome: Pakistani Hindus in India will be published by the University of Chicago Press.

Faculty profile: https://anthropology.cornell.edu/natasha-raheja