Towards uncommon grounds: heterogenous vocabularies of the valley and the gulf

This article stages a dialogue between the two distant sites of our respective research, located in India and Georgia, both of which are at the centre of major infrastructural transformations. From these two sites of Kutch and west Georgia, the authors have noticed that local vocabularies are testaments to material economies of place and often contain traces of histories and relations that are erased by the global script through which infrastructural developments are justified and narrated. In striving to build a different kind of narration of the transformations that have invested them they place their incommensurability in focus through our exchange. Instead of comparison, this bringing together of two worlds is shaped by acknowledging a shared interest and common concerns. Borrowing from De La Cadena (‘Uncommoning nature’, 2015), the authors define their effort as a form of ‘uncommoning’ that shapes possible alliances to resist extractive projects, while allowing for divergence and differences in how the world is viewed (or written).