My summer at Cornell was a good one—a joyful, productive, and memorable experience. I am grateful for all facets of the six weeks at SCT, from the seminar and weekly lectures to workshops by editors from Diacritics and experts of creative writings, every-day commutes through gorges of Ithaca, and of course, many late-night gatherings at cozy bars. I participated in Sundar Sarrukai’s seminar Philosophies of the Natural and the Social with the goal of bolstering my competency in thinking through theories concerning the worlds of both nature and society, in preparation for crafting my dissertation proposal this year. Sarrukai’s seminar was particularly appealing since I was baffling with a question—how do I define landscape, a product of both nature and humans, for my thesis? It is a fundamental, yet often forgotten, question in the discipline of Landscape Architecture.

Sarrukai’s seminar was instrumental in understanding these two concepts from diverse perspectives. I happily found myself in the interdisciplinary setting where some of us were interested in how the idea of “nature” is socially crafted and reproduced, and how its elusive nature legitimatizes certain societal actions. The naturalization of “what is natural” for a human society can be a powerful weapon to mobilize and incite racial, gender, and class injustices. Some of us were particularly interested in how the idea of “the natural world” manifests in a built environment through social productions. I was trying to understand how “landscape”—a term that is as ambiguous as nature and society—relates to the domains of “the natural” and “the social.” I now see a landscape at the converging point of the two and define it as a rendition of social/cultural understandings of what(ever) “the natural world” is, can be, or ought to be, constructed through a technological means to work with the elements and forces of nature.

I am also immensely indebted to Sundar’s teaching outside the classroom. I visited his office weekly for conversations about History of Science and Heideggerian philosophy on technology, as I struggled to understand Heidegger’s seminal essay “The Question Concerning Technology” (1954). The essay critically examines modern technology and its relationship with the human, and Heidegger suggests that modern technology ensnares the human to view the world only as a resource awaiting exploitation. This results in a perpetual and degenerative cycle of humans’ technological dependence and alienation from making a true relationship with nature. My confusion came, in part, from his understanding of nature, which wasn’t clear to me. Curiously enough, “nature” goes undefined in this short essay, despite appearing twenty times. Our conversation about this Heidegger’s text, thinking through what is undefined, turned the confusion into a research question—“while the QCT illustrates Heidegger’s conceptualization of technology’s essence, how might Heidegger conceptualize nature’s essence?” I worked with this question in the latter half of the program to present at the SCT conference at the end. This conference was a highlight of my SCT experience, as not only did I get a chance of putting together a paper that reflected my summer work but I also had an opportunity to organize a panel titled “Drawing the Line: Nature, Art, and Technē” with peers in the program.

As I close my reflection here, I’m thankful for the generous support of the Nicholson Fellowship and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory for giving me this invaluable step towards becoming a scholar. People that I met and conversations (of all kinds) that took place, are all unforgettable memories in my doctoral journey. I’m also grateful for the Unit team, Jamie, Shelley, and Dede, for arranging all the logistics that made this opportunity possible.