Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.

Accepted Paper:

Plastic Landscapes that Enfold: Documents that Materialize  
Vasundhara Bhojvaid (Shiv Nadar University)

Paper short abstract:

The climate is realized in how little contexts or ‘landscapes’ come together in negotiations in a climate change project. What the climate becomes or how plastic landscapes enfold cannot be pre-told and is a result of how researchers, villages, NGO workers, amongst others enmesh with two documents.

Paper long abstract:

In order to understand the life of a climate change project, this paper will use the concept of 'landscapes' or little meshwork's to highlight what Mosse terms the 'practices of development' (Mosse 2005).

In 2012 a USAID funded project, spearheaded by environmental economists based out of an American university that sought to promote the use of improved cookstoves (ICS) was implemented in the mountainous state of Uttarakhand (India). With a sample of 1050 households it became paramount to convince local NGOs to partner with the project leads - a struggle in synchronizing different temporalities about weather and relatedly health. The negotiations highlighted that the climate was implicated and more importantly realized in the way that different landscapes aligned, without knowing what these landscapes would lead to. Such a view takes on Malabou's notion of plasticity (Malabou 2005) to argue that landscapes are plastic in that they are form giving - context generating - without a pre-conceived notion of what the enfolded form of the landscape will lead to or become, thus allowing for a move beyond inquiries afflicted between the scientific study of an atemporalised nature and the humanist study of a dematerialised history.

By highlighting the materiality of two documents as a relationship across events of seimiosis (Hull 2012), a property of whole social arrangements that enmeshes the American researchers, USAID, the mountain NGO and the people of the villages, the paper will attempt to demonstrate that what the weather becomes is realized through enfolding plastic landscapes.

Panel P02
Weathering Time Itself: multiple temporalities and the human scale of climate change
  Session 1