This report analyzes different sets of relief payments that have been made from the federal government, the government of California, city governments, and non-profits which focus on helping individuals and families during the COVID-19 outbreak.

In 2015, disastrous floods impacted the lives of over seven million people living on the Coromandel coast, in and around the South Indian city of Chennai. In the same year, the Government of India proposed a policy called Sagarmala, which launched large-scale logistics and industrial infrastructure and port-based development along the V-shaped Indian coastline. At the intersection of climate risks and infrastructure development, I approach the coast as a geologic ethnos: a world marked by a “geos” or earth that is never fully settled but always shifting forms such as shoals, sandbars, intertidal zones due to socioecological processes of human and more-than-human making.

This ethnography of the Coromandel coast as geological ethnos builds on 15 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork (2018-19) conducted with coastal publics—artisanal fishers, bureaucrats, and environmental justice activists—at public spaces on the coast, urban and rural coastal neighborhoods, private homes, bureaucratic offices, and environmentalist activist offices in Tamil Nadu. I find that diverse coastal futures of industrial expansion, artisanal fishing, and ecological repair among coastal publics hinge crucially on modifying the coastal boundary line. While human interventions attempt to remake what coastal nature is and put the coast to work towards political ends, the Coromandel coast routinely exceeds human intervention and complicates any linear stories about humans exerting technological mastery and control over nature.

I make empirical and theoretical contributions to economic and environmental anthropology of infrastructure and wet environments by showing that the shifting grounds of land and water at the coast—due to both geomorphological and political processes—necessitate a rethinking of social categories of property, work, and environment. In each chapter of the dissertation, I chart out what new pathways for climate justice emerge from the geological and political contestations over property, work, and environment at the coast. Theorizing from the Coromandel coast, I argue that the environmental futures of liminal coastal geographies are forged through unexpected contingent, open-ended reworking of geologic, ecological, and political relations and can potentially seed non-extractivist environmental futures. The unexpected entanglements of material, meaning, and more-than-human desires leave the future of the coast open to new possibilities.