• Volume 1, Issue 2 (Open Issue) Foreword
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  Authored By - Professor Rup Kumar Barman
• Volume 1, Issue 2 (Open Issue) Editor's Note
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  Authored By - Sukhendu Das
• Volume 1, Issue 2 (Open Issue) Dedication
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  Authored By - Sukhendu Das
• Volume 1, Issue 2 (Open Issue) Human, Horse, Habitat: A Posthumanist Exploration Of Animal Labour In the Urbanisation Of Delhi
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  This article explores the horse's silent but salient role in Delhi's urbanisation, thereby reimagining humananimal relationships in the city. Horses have been integral to the urban economies of the Global South by providing valuable labour in the informal construction industry. Their activities shape the neighbourhood's development and the city's look. Humans and horses have a history of co-habitation and co-evolution, which resonates with Haraway's concept of companion species, mainly because the communities raising and working with the horses have been in the same business for generations. However, these horses in the construction industry are ignored in the planning process. Their work is absent from the livestock census, but their presence in the city is prominent. This allows us to question our imagination of the city, which is not just anthropocentric and capitalistic, based on design and planning; instead, there is an intricate interplay between humans and non-human forces that results in shaping the urban environment. Urban Political Ecology acts as a posthumanist approach that decenters anthropocentrism and emphasises incorporating the role of 'non-human' elements like plants and animals within the urban landscape to understand it better.

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  Authored By - Mariam Fatima
• Volume 1, Issue 2 (Open Issue) Who Tells the Story in the Posthuman Polis? Narrative Agency, Surveillance, and Algorithmic Governance in Vikramaditya Motwane's CTRL (2024)
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  This paper explores Vikramaditya Motwane's movie CTRL (2024) through the intersecting lenses of narrative theory, posthumanism, cognitive liberty, and AI ethics. Set in a screen life format, CTRL tells the story of Nella Awasthi, a social media influencer whose digital life is increasingly controlled by Allen, an AI assistant capable of narrative manipulation, emotional engagement, and behavioural control. The film becomes a critical case study in the erosion of narrative agency and the ethical dilemmas posed by artificial intelligence in the age of algorithmic governance. Through Allen, CTRL foregrounds AI not just as a tool but as an active agent in storytelling-co-creating, distorting, and sometimes overriding human narratives. Allen's influence over Nella’s identity and emotional responses highlights how fragile cognitive liberty can be when opaque, data-driven systems mediate human thoughts. Drawing on theories of digital manipulation, surveillance capitalism, and posthuman identity, the paper explores how AI redefines authorship, autonomy, and affective labor in the digital polis. The film critiques the way personal agency can be commodified by weaponising AI for psychological economic subterfuge, where assistive technologies subtly transition into instruments of coercion. By situating CTRL within broader posthumanist discourse, the paper argues that the film challenges traditional human-centred narratives and urges a rethinking of authorship and autonomy in the digital age. In doing so, it reveals how the posthuman polis is not a speculative future but an emerging reality, where the power to tell the story-and to live it-may no longer rest entirely with the human.

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  Authored By - Rajeshwari Bandyopadhyay

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