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Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on ethnographic research and examines how the rise of China in Laos is impacting on the aspirations of Lao youth with respect to consumption choices and aspirations of future opportunities.

Paper long abstract:

China is arriving in Laos very literally with construction beginning on the Lao-China Railway, a major infrastructure project under One Belt: One Road which is set for completion in 2021. The Lao-China Railway has wide-reaching implications, including relocations of large numbers of people and significant changes in Lao culture and society as Laos negotiates a changing and sometimes difficult relationship with China. Many Lao articulate serious concerns about the growth of China in Laos both in terms of physical and cultural changes. However, at the same time, many Lao youth own Chinese made products, aspire to learn Chinese for better opportunities and attempt to study in China. Lao youth therefore speculate that even if not entirely desirable, China will become increasingly prominent in their own futures and the future of Laos. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper argues that perceptions around China in Laos are both complex and contradictory but are having noticeable impacts on the social fabric of Laos as people make life decisions increasingly with explicit reference to rising China. Second, that the issue will become more acute as the railway becomes a reality in contemporary Laos. Finally, that despite divergent economic contexts, Lao youth show considerable agency in shaping emerging relationships with China.

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Paper short abstract:

Rural infrastructure functions as subsidies for extractive industries, contend the Kondh, a vulnerable Indian tribe. This paper discusses how frontier expansion is mutually constituted by the imperatives of extraction and a continuously produced backwardness that demand infrastructural fixes.

Paper long abstract:

In India's southeastern state of Odisha, an extractive model of development is pursued most aggressively in its resource-rich but politically marginal indigenous areas. Understood to be lacking in exploitable resources or a substantial agricultural revenue base, Odisha remained relatively inaccessible during the colonial period. Since the discovery of bauxite in the 1980s, a social periphery has transformed into a commodity frontier, and roads are at the forefront of this shift.

This paper examines how the conjoining of extractive industries and rural infrastructure - roads, dams, bridges and railways - has developed an 'area' but alienated its 'people'. Based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I will discuss how an indigenous anti-mining social movement's refusal to be connected by asphalt has kept resource extraction, and imminent displacement, at bay.

If extraction animates the state's impetus to provide accessibility, it is also expected to rectify social backwardness. Southern Odisha's Niyamgiri Mountain, the site of 72 million tons of bauxite reportedly worth $2 billion, is also home to the Dongria and Kutia Kondh, two of India's 75 Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups. The cost of roads is in trees felled and streams polluted by mining, and cannot be offset by better access to subsidized food rations, farming extension services, hospitals and schools, contend the Kondh.

Refusing roads in Niyamgiri reveals a universal dynamic: commodity frontier expansion is mutually constituted by the imperative of extraction and a continuously produced backwardness that demands intervention and amelioration through infrastructure.

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Paper short abstract:

This contribution, empirically based on ethnographic fieldwork in Rotterdam, discusses how the informal infrastructure of refugee reception materializes in anticipation to repression. It examines how accepted refugees assemble possibilities that emerge at the intersection of moralities of 'active citizenship' and 'activist citizenship'.

Paper long abstract:

In the Netherlands from 2015 onwards, the spectacle of newcomers

arriving to seek refuge was channelled by vast media attention and

political debate. Residents increasingly responded to this greater

visibility of newcomers. In the Dutch city of Rotterdam, grassroots

initiatives and reception brokers multiplied, and are consolidated in an

informal infrastructure of reception. Implicated in this infrastructure

are initiatives that former refugees (prepare to) initiate themselves,

with the aim of helping people with a refugee background to navigate.

Against the background of repressive formal municipal policies towards

refugees in Rotterdam, as well as a history of resident protests against

the construction of a local reception centre, the informal reception

infrastructure gains relative stability by shared imaginaries of

solidarity that circulate among these grassroots initiatives and

reception brokers. The informal reception infrastructure materializes in

anticipation to expected repression by municipal actors and the

possibility of resident protest - thus allowing for speculative

imaginaries of repression to shape the infrastructure’s workings.

In turn, accepted refugees, in negotiating a legitimate role in that

city, travel through this infrastructure and assemble possibilities in

order to become ‘unmoved’ by the reception infrastructure and - so the

imaginary goes - ultimately ‘arrive’. Accepted refugees, as well those

that seek to help them, draw upon moralities of 'active citizenship' -

premised on the idea that good residents participate - as well as upon

moralities of 'activist citizenship' - premised on the idea that good

residents challenge the existing order - in order to position themselves.

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Paper short abstract:

Subterranean heating pipes in Ulaanbaatar, their potential presence, absence, upgrading or decay form part of peoples' infrastructural imaginaries that shape decisions around property. This paper charts the emerging infrastructural ethics that shape people's conceptualisation of the city.

Paper long abstract:

Tracing peoples' attempts to access and obtain types of real estate in Ulaanbaatar, both apartments or land plots in the city's expanding peri-urban areas reveal complex forms of ethical imperatives concerning the presence and absence of access to heating and running water. This city is largely made up of two main areas, ostensibly consisting of different built forms that are infrastructurally determined: a central area consisting of apartments connected to socialist-era central heating, and a rapidly expanding and much larger area of land plots not connected to core infrastructure, consisting of gers (Mongolian nomadic felt collapsible dwellings) and self-built houses. The lack of equitable heating has resulted in large amounts of seasonal air pollution as people burn coal to warm their houses.

Subterranean heating pipes, their potential presence, absence, upgrading or decay form a large part of peoples' infrastructural imaginaries that shape a diverse number of speculative economic decisions relating to property. Drawing from ethnographic research in a suburb that sits in the cusp between these two areas, and among people living in different areas of the city, tracing peoples' speculations on infrastructure present a different perception of the material make-up of the city. Looking at infrastructural speculation through the multifaceted quest for 'life quality' reveals a porousness between these two main built environments that bely and challenge class delineations, economic imperatives and built forms.

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Paper short abstract:

Water filters are widely used in New York City. Paradoxically, while the filters materialize the fears and specters of contamination, they simultaneously reassert the purity and 'natural morality' of water circulating through the vast watershed and infrastructure of the city.

Paper long abstract:

Water, Gaston Bachelard wrote, possesses a 'natural morality.' This is much more so the case for New York City's tap water infrastructure. The municipal body providing water (DEP) constantly (and rightly so) points out that, unlike other cities, the flow of water in New York is made possible by 'natural' elements and processes - rain accumulating in the upstate NY watershed and water flowing by gravity - instead of energy-intensive filtration and pumping processes. Yet, the 'natural morality' and purity of tap water face an array of specters of contamination before entering city residents' bodies. Such specters of contamination include symbolic and material choke points such as concerns about taste, panics, limits to sensemaking of technological systems, the general state of the sanitation of the city, and fears of old-age pipes and of lead poisoning in homes and schools. Drawing on ethnographic material gathered in 2018, I describe how the natural morality of water is disrupted during its circulation through New York City and how these disruptions, in turn, create new subjectivities, forms of agency and low tech decentralized technological assemblages. I focus in particular on the widespread use of water filters in homes, restaurants, as well as public spaces as a widespread solution to reduce health and environmental anxieties around contamination, and to reassert the natural morality of New York City's public water.

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Paper short abstract:

The article examines the particular form of development embodied by China Pakistan Economic Corridor and the double meaning of speculative investments that this development has provoked in the high mountain communities of the Pamir and Karakorum regions of N. Pakistan.

Paper long abstract:

This article interrogates discourses of development around the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) in Northern Pakistan. As the current centrepiece of the Chinese One Belt, One Road (OBOR) initiative, CPEC consists of a $46 billon dollar plus commitment to upgrade and build new infrastructure, energy projects, free trade zones and more across the entire length of Pakistan. The scale of this investment is the largest commitment by China in any single country, matched by a frenzied speed of government-to-government contracting which has left much of the public speculating about what is to come. The article examines the double meaning of speculative investments that this development has provoked in the high mountain communities of the Pamir and Karakorum regions of N. Pakistan and the particular material visions of the future that it provokes.