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P008a


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Infrastructural makeshifts: the temporality and materiality of hope in times of urban transformations I 
Convenors:
Deana Jovanovic (Utrecht University)
Maria Salaru (University College London)
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Discussant:
Penny Harvey (University of Manchester)
Format:
Panel
:
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, -
Panel Video visible to paid-up delegates