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- Convenors:
-
Jon Schubert
(University of Basel)
Luisa Arango (CEDEJ Khartoum, MEAE - CNRS USR 3123)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Peter Froggatt Centre (PFC), 03/012
- Sessions:
- Thursday 28 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The current ecological, health, political, and socio-economic crises have forced the postponement or shelving of projects at various levels. What kind of traces do unrealised projects leave, and how can we ethnographically explore these? And what possible common futures can be gleaned from these?
Long Abstract:
The current ecological, pandemic-related, political, and socio-economic crises have forced the postponement or shelving of projects at various levels — from individual life projects to research programmes, to larger-scale political agendas and development projects — massively affecting our daily lives for the past two years especially. Yet the restructuring of a development project, or even its failure, is quite a common case, even pre-pandemic, and anthropologists are likely to encounter traces of these "paper dreams" in their fieldwork.
With the advent of a "project culture" largely driven by donors and by the neoliberalisation of development there is a profusion of traces let by these unrealised projects: maps, preliminary studies, project proposals, budgets, amendments, electronic exchanges, rejection letters. Beyond what our interlocutors tell us, these countless documents can tell us a lot about our dreams, hopes and ways of seeing, taming and producing the future.
Focusing specifically on the traces left by unrealised projects, this panel invites papers that explore questions such as:
- How can these traces help us understand hopes and anxieties about our common futures?
- How has rampant "project culture" impacted the production of possible futures? Does it render our approach to the future more rigid?
- Beyond their planetary impact, how have the current sanitary and ecological crises produced new time horizons and different responses to demands for the restructuring or cancellation of such projects?
- How have our own dashed hopes (personal, research funding and data) reshaped our understanding of our 'fields'?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 28 July, 2022, -Stefanie Mauksch (Leipzig University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the temporal paradox of startup nostalgia – the cultivation of memory around business projects that have never been launched. I explore this paradox in context of the newly evolving startup community in Khartoum, Sudan.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I engage with the afterlives of failed entrepreneurial startups in Khartoum. Startup founders at times held their business failures in joyful memory, but also expressed darker feelings of an urban youth that finds itself bereft of economic possibility. Starting from the observation that founders framed their startups as both not yet alive and already dead, I explore the coexistence of two opposed temporal formations and the work needed to maintain them. Young people continue to revitalize their projects and express hopes for positive shifts and new money and support. At the same time, they bury their projects rendering them dust-catching artifacts of the past. By exploring this two-fold narrative work, and the material entanglements involved, I depict startup nostalgia as an ambivalent form of longing for a (past) entrepreneurial life that has not yet been lived. I argue that failed startups cannot easily be concluded as they have been brought to contain and materialize graduates’ hopes for improvements and efforts to fill what they had projected as their gap in the universe. The forwards-looking and backwards-memorizing of young people reflects the difficult future making of graduates in Sudan. Startup nostalgia allows young people to appreciate their failures as achievements and to invest into expectations of favorable change. Accounts of startup memory deepen understanding of the effects of mobilizations in contexts of the Global South in which entrepreneurial buzzmaking is on the rise, whereas material support and infrastructural investments remain suspiciously absent.
Paolo Grassi (University of Milano Bicocca)
Paper short abstract:
Based on anthropological literature that questions the role and significance of urban regeneration in making contemporary cities, this paper will critically analyse some of the futuristic urban projects that will rebuild in the coming years seven Milanese abandoned railway yards.
Paper long abstract:
At least since the World Expo of 2015, Milan has been going through a phase of growth and expansion that moves from the organisation of mega-events and the implementation of large urban regeneration programs, including the one that will redevelop seven abandoned railway yards – “Scali ferroviari” in Italian – for a total of more than one million square meters. However, the lead times remain quite uncertain, leaving space for the production of ambiguous imaginaries on the future of the city. Moreover, this kind of urban development does not hide contradictions. Even following the pandemic, Milan is increasing its social polarisation. Wealthy and central areas juxtapose degraded and “left behind” public neighbourhoods. Based on anthropological literature that questions the role and significance of urban regeneration in making contemporary cities, this paper will critically analyse some of the futuristic projects presented by famous architecture studies since 2016, in response to calls and public competitions launched by the Municipality of Milan and the Italian Railways. In fact, as highlighted by some groups of social actors (such as local committees and political associations), despite the utopian imaginary of a green and sustainable city, these upcoming projects hide opposite urban strategies, based on the privatisation of public space and land rent. “From the railway yards, a new city”, declares one of the claims on the “Scali ferroviari” program website. The paper will explore what kind of “new city” is being built, who is contesting it and why.
Jon Schubert (University of Basel)
Paper short abstract:
How can we account for the social efficacy of nonrealised infrastructures? This paper investigates a spectral refinery in Lobito, Angola, to think about the futures opened up by speculation on infrastructure.
Paper long abstract:
Over the past decade, anthropologists have engaged with the ‘promise of infrastructure’: the publics created, the collective relations formed, the technologies and desires mobilised in the pursuit of such investments. Yet how can we account for the social efficacy of unrealised projects? This paper traces the social life of a ‘spectral’ oil refinery in the Angolan port town of Lobito. In a moment of crisis, lives revolve around the of goods, of money, and of perspectives, giving substance to absence. Rather than thinking of the ‘suturing points’ of the city — the port, the railway, and the planned refinery — as capitalist debris or evidence of collapsed futures, we may think of people’s engagement with paper infrastructures as speculative.