Hi! we’re Toshali and Vedant, formally PhD scholars, but this collaboration was born out of conversation: the kind that refuses to stick to the point, that slides down slippery slopes, becomes a difficult hike, unspools in unseen text-threads, or simply spills out as a brief, unpaused rant. What began as exchange has become a practice of listening and staying with what surfaces between us.In this temporal topography of “conversations” we habitually take a pause and touch the ground, to feel the texture, to find the foundation that makes conversation possible. That foundation is concern: concern for the world in which such exchanges can occur, as broadly as possible, as situationally as possible, and as honestly and organically as possible. In a world organised around action, the impulse to converse is not obvious; conversation itself is an action, yet its truest form often arrives unplanned. Conversations are openings, fragile spaces that leave traces even as they erase themselves onto the other.When we imagined how to populate these openings, we wanted to attend, to the things people write, to the practices they live by, to the performances of self they enact. So we named this space Khôra: an online presence to connect, to write with us, to think and contest. Come with us not to fix or conclude, but to be moved closer, so that, in the brief contact of exchange, we glimpse, for a moment, a reason to be human in one another.

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Toshali is a PhD candidate and an urbanist at heart. Her doctoral project examines urban transport systems as sites where socio-technical networks, cultural practice and labour intersect. As an ethnographer, her practice is often translated through artistic mediums. Or perhaps she is simply most at ease when all her senses are fully engaged in the field. 

For her, sketching opens alternative channels of interpretation: drawing alongside field notes, recording ambient sounds, mapping detours and waiting times, and tracing non-human rhythms (not to forget curious gazes from pedestrians). These habits have become part of her toolkit for understanding how cities move, pause and remember. Outside academic life, she is happiest walking/hiking aimlessly and eating enthusiastically, with tastes that range from falooda to frog legs; proof that curiosity, for her, is both an intellectual and culinary pursuit. 

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Vedant , is a curious PhD candidate in sociology and socio-cultural anthropology at Shiv Nadar University working on food and cultural transformation by situating himself with the informal working network of milk suppliers around Delhi, attending to thier labour, their journies and making sense of how cultures are deeply entanged with 'milk'. Vedant hopes to bring careful ethnographic attention and everyday worlds in a conversation and exchange them as stories, through his writing, films and images. He love films and anthropology, relish close conversations and collaborative projects, and bring a warm, probing curiosity to research.