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- Convenors:
-
Deana Jovanovic
(Utrecht University)
Maria Salaru (University College London)
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- Discussant:
-
Penny Harvey
(University of Manchester)
- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Lanyon Building (LAN), 01/052
- Sessions:
- Friday 29 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel aims to ethnographically inspect the temporal and material ways in which makeshift practices play a crucial role in making everyday infrastructural lives possible in contemporary times of urban transformations.
Long Abstract:
Profound contemporary urban transformations, fuel insecurity and increased energy prices have been propelled by social, political and economic crises. These brought to the fore many inventive ways in which individuals and institutions have approached the ensuing infrastructural obstacles. For instance, difficulties to maintain utility provision or to pay for it are often solved by creative - and sometimes illicit - solutions (Jovanović 2021). This panel invites papers that explore various practices of undertaking inventive and resourceful solutions to problems posed by contemporary transformations of city infrastructure, exacerbated by their financialization, privatization and the withdrawal of the state. We specifically invite ethnographically-rich papers that document makeshift practices of circumventing, patching, deceiving, improving, and concealing, which make transformed material infrastructural provisions more accessible.
Infrastructures are hope-generating, future-oriented and anticipatory material devices (Harvey 2011, Reeves 2017). This panel looks at temporal dimensions of material manifestations of different makeshift practices that inflect everyday social rhythms: ad hoc, stopgap, improvised and temporary solutions that citizens resort to while striving for a good life and maintaining hope for "normal life" (Jansen 2015). Hence, the panel inspects temporal and material aspects of how makeshift practices play a crucial role in making everyday infrastructural lives possible. We are looking for papers on anthropological inquiries of (but not restricted to) materiality, commoning, affect, care, hope and "ordinary ethics" (Lambek 2010). While offering new perspectives on the intersection of a growing body between anthropological literature on energy, infrastructures and temporalities, we encourage submissions from various ethnographic and theoretical perspectives.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 29 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
In response to infrastructural undersupply and continuing deprivation of basic social goods, residents of Johannesburg's periphery intervene into public electricity infrastructure. I discuss these actions' social and material effects with view to the local appearance of the post-apartheid state
Paper long abstract:
Apartheid's spatial legacy inflicted Johannesburg's urban surrounds with continuing patterns of disparate urban development. Neoliberal policies after liberation failed to address these patterns and contributed to the deterioration of the public service delivery apparatus. Against the background of insufficient provision with electricity, ever increasing price hikes, and regular infrastructural breakdowns, residents of the metropole's townships are striving to organize their everyday lives by resorting to various makeshift practices. As I will illustrate, ordinary residents and community activists alike intervene into the process of making infrastructure by contributing to its material becoming from the grid edge. Thereby, they challenge established notions of legitimacy, expertise and governability concerning the management of large technological systems and intentionally contest the government's regulatory regime. A comprehensive, informal socio-technical network emerged around the infrastructural endings, which thereby become the site of contentions over both, the redistributive commitment as well as the phenomenology of the post-apartheid state. Hence, I propose to discuss these people's engagements with electricity infrastructure in terms of a mundane state-building from the margins as surrogate to state effects on the ground. Yet, as I will show, such networks run the risk of a dialectic outcome: while makeshift practices and their socio-material organization effectively serve the purpose of temporarily bridging gaps in provisioning, they are prone to enshrine the already fragmented infrastructural landscape people inhabit even further.
Paper short abstract:
The ethnographically paper explores the ways the electric meters in Serbia were calibrated by families and shows how the electric company was implicated in such makeshift practices. The paper argues that through calibrating the meters, gender and kinship relationship were calibrated too.
Paper long abstract:
A great amount of anthropological literature on infrastructures focused so far on how the political manifests through material infrastructures. For instance, one of the main focuses was to understand the “infrastructuralization” of state power (Chu 2014; Mann 1984), the simultaneous presence and absence of the state (Harvey 2005) or how the withdrawal of the state is experienced through them (Schwenkel 2017). The anticipatory quality of infrastructures, as a locus of anticipation with capacity to enact a future in the present, which have political implications, have been discerned as well (Larkin 2011; Reeves 2017). The paper argues that such dominant approaches to the notion of the political omitted other categories from the studies, such as gender and kinship, which are implicated in the production of power and in the reproduction of the political. This article fills in this gap and explores the ways in which the relationship with electrical infrastructures in Serbia calibrated gender and kinship relations. The paper explores the matter ethnographically by looking into ways in which the electric meters were calibrated by families in Serbia and how the state-owned electric company and their workers were implicated in such makeshift practices. The paper argues that such material engagements became conduits of social relations and that through calibrating the meters gender and kinship relationships were calibrated as well. The paper also adds that their political implications had particular resonance in the everyday lives.
Paper short abstract:
Cuba’s COVID-19 response was rapid, effective, and modeled after prior pandemic experiences. I engage Derrida’s concept hauntology to highlight these connections and temporal continuities of infrastructural breakdowns evident during the pandemic with the 1990’s “Special Period.”
Paper long abstract:
Cuba’s initial response to COVID-19 was rapid, effective, and modeled after prior pandemic experiences (e.g., HIV/AIDS, dengue, Ebola). The state’s quick mobilization had a familiar feel, as did the United States’ tightening of its decades long embargo through full enforcement of 1996’s Helm’s Burton Act. Resulting scarcities in food, fuel, and raw materials reminded many of the 1990’s “Special Period” and prompted the reopening to tourism in November 2020, which led to increased transmission and mortality from COVID-19. Cuba’s response also revealed challenges posed by vulnerabilities resulting from aging and weak municipal infrastructures. Deteriorating housing, poor air flow, and sweltering heat undermined adherence to early lockdown measures, putting those over age 60 – an increasingly large proportion of the population – at particular risk. Limitations on mobility via enforced individual and community-level quarantines in the context of this crumbling infrastructure exacerbated frustrations with the state’s inability to deliver on its promise of care, evident in the July 2021 protests. This paper engages Derrida’s concept of hauntology to highlight the temporal continuity of these scarcities, and to call into question largely accepted “endings” of the “Special Period.” I posit the politics of temporality in this case is also a politics of disappointment; a recognition of the repeated failure of the state to provide promised resources, whether in the form of equitable housing, elder support or consistent access to adequate food.
Paper short abstract:
To exit costly and untrustworthy public heat and hot water provision, middle class Tashkenters install individual boilers. But “boilerisation” reworks both the technical system and the social fabric, as the infrastructure’s neoliberal unbundling pushes users towards individualism and uncommoning.
Paper long abstract:
The neoliberal pressures that came hand-in-hand with Uzbekistan’s independence have not left Tashkent’s Soviet-era centralised heat and hot water infrastructure unaffected. While the system has not been privatised, its inherent shortcomings—e.g., inadequate heat and hot water pressure in higher floor apartments and inability of users to choose when and how much heat they consume—have been augmented by a lack of modernisation and maintenance. Yet, this has not stopped the city-owned operator from biannually increasing tariffs, prompting many users to opt out of the city’s monopoly over heat and hot water provision by installing individual electric or gas boilers. “Boilerisation” is thus an act of freedom from the limitations of Soviet-era infrastructure and, for the burgeoning middle class who can afford to invest in this relatively expensive technology, a token of upward social mobility and financial success. But boilerisation has important repercussions on the lives of those unable to install boilers as well, as the illicit uninstallation of radiators that often accompanies the process unbalances the hydraulic architecture of residential buildings. Given that apartments with boilers no longer pay for heat and hot water, boilerisation also passes the costs for the system’s maintenance to those unable to boilerise, facing them with even higher utility bills. Boilerisation thus entails a radical reworking not only of the technical systems involved in heat and hot water provision, but also of the social fabric and of infrastructural lives, as the neoliberal unbundling of infrastructure pushes users towards individualism, effectively leading to uncommoning.
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores how those who worked for the state in a military capacity remember serving in Belfast in the context of the material transformation of the urban landscape that post-conflict 'normalisation' brought to the city.
Paper long abstract:
The recent period of conflict in Northern Ireland officially ended with the Good Friday Agreement (1998) and the partial withdrawal of British troops (2007). During the conflict, the British Army's presence in Belfast involved the construction of a 'military theatre' including the erection of watchtowers, barracks, checkpoints, and sangars, in addition to segregating walls, today known as 'peace walls'. While the latter has been theorized as introducing a 'normalisation of exception' in the segregated city (Donnan & Jarman, 2017), most of the military infrastructure has been removed as part of a process of post-conflict 'transition, demilitarization and normalisation' (Donnan & Jarman, 2017).
While for most, tearing down military structures brought the gradual introduction of 'normality' to social life in Belfast, it also inflected the social rhythms of military work lives. This paper explores how those who worked for the state in a military capacity remember serving in Belfast in the context of the material transformation of the urban landscape that 'normalisation' brought to the city. I argue that individuals routinely transform places of former military infrastructures into 'everyday places of memory' (Grossman, 2019), where affective afterlives of conflict are played out. Based on a small selection of ethnographic material using car rides in the city of Belfast with former soldiers as an ethnographic research tool, I highlight how urban transformations inflect particular occupational identities and the moral qualities associated with them, complicating understandings of post-conflict 'normality' in turn.