Ronishka Sabu Nalpathil

Ronishka Sabu Nalpathil is a Ph.D. in Architecture (PhD-Arch) student at Carnegie Mellon Architecture. She holds a master's degree in Advanced Architectural Design from Cornell AAP (2024) and a Bachelor of Architecture degree with honors from Virginia Tech (2023). Her research attends to the ways colonial governance reconfigured ecologies, kinship, and domestic space in South India through the extraction of teak. Situated at the interstices of architecture, environmental history, and decolonial studies, her dissertation traces how forestry regimes, juridical instruments, and photographic practices rendered teak into an imperial ontology (mapped, measured and exhausted) while its depletion reconstituted the spatial order of the "nalukettu" and the matrilineal "taravad." By reading teak as both matter and mode of power, her work foregrounds the entangled violences of dispossession, ecological rupture, and kinship dislocation that sedimented under colonial and feudal dominion. Methodologically, she combines archival excavation, counter-mapping, material reconstruction, and narrative practice to engage the silences of empire and to imagine architectures of matriliny otherwise. Her research positions architecture as both a sediment of colonial violence and a potential vessel for collective memory and repair. Ronishka's work envisions architecture not as a discipline confined to the aesthetics of commemoration but as a radical praxis capable of re-embedding relational spatial orders that colonial governance sought to erase, asking how architecture might hold space for resilience in the wake of loss and dispossession.

Research Interests

• Extractive geographies
• Material histories
• Decolonial imaginaries
• Silencing, subalternity and archival erasures

Teaching

• 62-104 – Design Ethics & Social Justice in Architecture
• 48-241 – Modern Architecture: History & Theory
• 48-634 – Architectural Theory & Contemporary Issues
• 48-383 – Ethics in Architecture

Affiliation

• South Asian Urban Climates