Paper short abstract:

The paper would explore the ways in which waste in the urban can be studied as intimate infrastructure. Looking at Mumbai ethnographically, the focus is on the politics of waste as a responses to speculative futures,which are political, affective, cultural, economic and social.

Paper long abstract:

Since the last twenty years India has been experiencing a significant rise in affective engagements relating to waste. These discourses are adept in looking at the environmental and economical networks that underlie the systems of waste in India's cities, but do not necessarily map out the social and ecological.

The paper looks at Mumbai, and more particularly the Deonar Dumping Ground (which is the city's largest and one of Asia's oldest landfills), and explores the multiple architectures and geneologies of waste in the lives of people who work/live with it. This helps in throwing light to the ways in which work, life and discrimination intersect each other while people try to adjust to waste and politically make sense of their lifeworlds. By using the ethnographic method, I plan on exploring the margins where the binaries of legal/illegal, moral/immoral, official/unofficial are transgressed, and structures of intimate ambiguities become salient. The paper raises questions of waste as infrastructure- is it to be understood as a technological or biological or social system (Zaloom 2006; Elyachar 2011)? Or is it a combination of all three, based in everyday rituals and practices?

Within the urban in India, there is a need to articulate the material informal politics of waste as a response to speculative urban practices of the present. These speculative practices do not promise ideal solutions but lead us towards a challenge of balancing toxicity and waste's normative powers.