Paper short abstract:

Our paper attends to the politics of recognition underlying infrastructure. It investigates the political capability of marginalised subjectivities in relation to infrastructure, and explores how these groups collectively act, foster community, and enact citizenship through shifts in subjectivity.

Paper long abstract:

Against the backdrop of marginalisation wrought by informal urbanisation, scholars of environmental justice, political ecology, and urban social movements have increasingly come to conceive of equity and social justice in terms of "political capability" (Schlosberg 2012; Holland 2017; Ensor et al 2021). Understood here as the extent to which people have control (or decision-making power) over their environment and livelihoods, this notion of political capability points towards two fundamental, yet hitherto relatively under-explored, aspects of environmental and urban transformation: subjectivity and recognition. In this paper we attend to the politics of recognition underlying infrastructure in order to investigate the political efficacy and capability of different subjectivities in relation to marginalisation and exclusion. We do this by investigating how marginalised groups of informal settlers engage in collective action, foster community, and enact citizenship through shifts in subjectivity at three infrastructural sites in Manohara informal settlement, Bhaktapur, Nepal. In doing so, we consider the fundamental entanglement of theory and practice (praxis), as well as the role that urban infrastructure systems play in fomenting knowledge controversies and galvanising affected publics in collective struggles (Latour and Weibel 2005; Barry 2013; Collier et al. 2016). These collective struggles emerge over access and inequalities in service provision, but also over social marginalisation and cultural stigma, and the lack of functioning citizenship (von Schnitzler 2008, 2016; Anand 2017; Fredericks 2018).