Presentation short abstract

How are waste workers' bodies infrastructured to constitute vital sanitation infrastructures and mediate waste metabolism in Indian cities, and how do technocratic infrastructural transitions delegitimise and devalue the infrastructural labour of waste workers, subjecting them to embodied violence?

Presentation long abstract

Despite being mobilised in constituting vital sanitation infrastructures and reproducing the everyday city, waste workers' bodies remain relatively understudied and disparately theorised in UPE scholarship. Departing from the ontological theorisation of “bodies as infrastructures”, I draw on my ongoing PhD research and argue how waste workers’ bodies are rendered disposable, and are violently “infrastructured”, drawing on casted, classed, and capitalist logics. Approaching caste as a “spatial-sensory-social order”, I highlight ways in which the discursive and material relationalities of both waste and dalit [the "ex-untouchables"] bodies get mediated and manifested through urban infrastructures and metabolic processes, resulting in the abjection of waste workers and their infrastructural labour, subjecting them to epistemic and material dispossession and different forms of embodied harms and infrastructural violence.

Drawing on the multi-sited ethnography of the formalising waste infrastructures in Patna, India, and by doing an “embodied” political ecology of waste, I highlight how the technocratic understandings and transitions of waste infrastructures is experienced at the scale of the body, leaving affective and material inscriptions on the labouring bodies where distinct political subjectivities are formed, and how they are mobilised for contesting and claiming waste, waste work, and waste workspaces by waste workers. Doing that highlights the “heterogeneous infrastructural configurations” through which waste metabolism is made possible in Indian cities, raises critical questions around what kinds of infrastructures are valued and prioritised, and reveals the embedded frictions, embodied violence, and uneven contestations that shape urban infrastructures, metabolic regimes, socio-ecological relations, and broader political ecologies of the city.