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- Convenors:
-
Matt Barlow
(University of Pennsylvania)
Rowan Jaines (University of Sheffield)
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- Discussant:
-
Georgina Drew
(University of Adelaide)
- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- Ligertwood 214 Piper Alderman Room
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 12 December, -, -
Time zone: Australia/Adelaide
Short Abstract:
This panel aims to highlight the ways in which peri-urban/semi-rural locations operate as liminal spaces caught between cities and the countryside by interrogating the role of infrastructures, and their manifestations across different scales, as intimate processes.
Long Abstract:
On May 23rd 2007, for the first time in history more people on Earth were recorded as living in urban rather than rural spaces. With this shift, cities are now understood as key centres of political, economic and social life, dependent upon a certain kind of infrastructural flexibility. At the same time, locations outside of core cities have been increasingly defined by their lack of infrastructure and mobility. This panel aims to interrogate the spaces in between, what we term 'liminal states', where the intimate affects of infrastructure are perhaps more visible than in distinctly urban or rural locations. We see these spaces as crucial sites for probing, for example, the ways in which the deterritorialising effects of global capital are impacting the precarious livelihoods of both migrant and indigenous communities. It is our hope that these discussions provide a timely commentary on broader debates regarding materiality and subjectivity. We invite papers from the fields of anthropology, human geography, urban studies, human ecology, and the environmental humanities more broadly, that contribute to these discussions.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 11 December, 2017, -Paper short abstract:
This paper critically examines the role of sewage infrastructure in the production of public and private lives.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing inspiration from two brief periods of fieldwork in the bourgeoning town of Darjeeling, India, this paper discusses how sewage infrastructure has come to shape public and private lives and public and private space since the installation of the Paris sewers in the mid 19th century. In recognising that 'modern' sewage infrastructure was built on particular prescriptive (European) ideas of how public and private life and space should operate, this paper asks: what kinds of (post)colonial worlds does sewage infrastructure propose? And how are these worlds crumbling amid the crisis' that the Anthropocene presents?
Paper short abstract:
Over 45% of Mongolia's population now call the capital city, Ulaanbaatar, home, 60% of whom dwell in the peri-urban 'ger districts' that circle the city centre. This paper explores intimate daily life on these margins, focusing on infrastructural realities and residents' relations to the state.
Paper long abstract:
The ger districts of Ulaanbaatar ring the capital city of Mongolia. Sprawling peri-urban areas characterised by unpaved roads, lack of running water and disconnected from the city's heating and sewerage systems, ger districts are named after the felt-walled yurts (ger in Mongolian) that countryside herders have moved to the city during the waves of post-socialist rural-to-urban migration. As the ger districts have come into being, the archetypal nomadic architectural form, the ger, has become fixed in space. The collection of thousands of fixed gers thus stands both as an allegory for and also a literal manifestation of the liminality of those who no longer live in the countryside and yet do not dwell in the city. Ger districts are precarious spaces in which one has to run to keep still: infrastructurally-speaking they force their residents to move, for example, to collect water, wood or coal; and yet residents lack access to the types of social and material 'movement' enjoyed by city centre residents. This paper draws on long-term fieldwork among both ger district residents and local government workers to explore the intimate everyday experiences of negotiating social and material life on these margins. It examines ger district residents' understanding of their relation to the state, one that is experienced primarily in infrastructural terms as a relationship of abandonment. Finally, it interrogates the ways in which contradictory dynamics of movement echo across multiple scales, examining how the unique infrastructure of the ger districts re-configures networks of relations in particular ways.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the impacts and implications of electronic waste infrastructure in a peri-urban context based on ethnographic fieldwork in Alice Springs, NT
Paper long abstract:
Who is responsible for the management of electronic waste (e-waste) in Central Australia? Where, when, and under what circumstances is e-waste made? When the national broadband network reaches across Central Australia, where should the waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) that supports it be buried or recycled? This paper builds upon ethnographic fieldwork in Alice Springs, Northern Territory to examine how national policy and infrastructure experiences and perceptions of place are shaped in a peri-urban context. In particular, the authors examine the consequences of connecting, rather than the ability of digital infrastructures to connect, regional and remote Australians to domestic and international urban centres. The 'tyranny of distance', a concept popularized by conservative historian Geoffrey Blainey (2001 [1966]), refers to the dynamic role geographic distance has played in shaping the history of Australia. This paper queries how the 'tyranny' of geo-political distance obscures the toxic, polluting, and exploitive qualities of e-waste by 1) critiquing the current regulatory framework for managing e-waste in Australia and 2) incorporating the perspectives of environmental activists, waste professionals, electrical repair technicians, and information communication technology (ICT) professionals, working in Alice Springs. Lastly, this paper considers the potential of digital infrastructures to provide a means for making the consequences and opportunities associated with e-waste more visible for residents, small businesses, and local governments in Alice Springs. This requires a reorientation within waste management from a focus exclusively on solid waste towards an understanding of the social, cultural and ecological impacts of resources that are used, reused, and discarded across the entire life history of digital technologies.
Paper short abstract:
Changing ones environment in order to aquire a better quality of life has been the goal for the western female lifestyle migrants who have moved to Ubud on the island of Bali. Here, the goal is to find the Good Life and to escape the previous life in their western home society.
Paper long abstract:
The aim of my research has been to provide a better understanding of specific factors that has turned lifestyle migration into an increasingly growing phenomenon. The research was conducted amongst female Western migrants in their 30s to 50s in the small town of Ubud in Indonesia. These women had «escaped» their former lifestyle and country of origin in order to live a «simpler» and more «alternative» way of life. «Alternative», in the context of the research, meant frequent participation in yoga classes and meditaion session, along with attending spiritual workshops, and being consious of ones diet.
The research highlights specific activities that the women performed in order to «fix» their emotional scars and physical pains, and is essentially due to the three core elements of Escapism, New Challenges, and Freedom. They had taken an holistic approach which consisted of attending regular yoga and meditation classes, self-realisation workshops, and «connecting with nature» from eating fresh, local, organic produce. These factors combined contributed to a new start in their search for a better quality of life and in finding what they perceived to be the Good Life.
Paper short abstract:
This paper interrogates the liminal spaces in between small town and rural life in the UK. It aims to untangle the ways in which the deterritorialising effects of global capital operate through the precarious livelihoods of both migrant and domestic workers and the formation of subjectivities.
Paper long abstract:
Economic power can be understood as the expression of an asymmetry of forces, providing the power to prescribe and impose modes of future domination through the construction of new subjectivities and affects. Studies of global cities have historically been central to the experiential analysis of poverty; however, rural areas experience specific deprivation and precarity which are often obscured through spatial and contextual idiosyncrasies. In view of this, relatively little is known about how inequalities contribute to the creation of semi-rural spaces in the UK and how specific subjectivities both form these processes and emerge as part of them. Changing forms of exploitation under late capitalism demand the emergence of new kinds of subjectivity in rural areas. This is, in part, due to the embodied demands of labour regimes and global capital in areas where industry hinges on territorialised and temporal processes as is the case in agriculture and food production. Findings will be introduced from a pilot study carried out between July and September 2017 with factory and agricultural workers in the area around The Wash. The research will use ethnographic and participatory arts techniques to interrogate the ways that wider systems of power interact with specific subjectivities in rural areas in order to make a call for new understandings of how subjectivity is both foundational to and formed by rural space
E-paper: this Paper will not be presented, but read in advance and discussed
Paper short abstract:
The outsourcing of metabolic infrastructures to peri-urban villages constitute an understudied dynamic. Research along drinking and wastewater canals in Gurgaon looks at how water produced for urban metabolism becomes implicated in the reconfiguration of socio-ecological relations in the peri-urban.
Paper long abstract:
Among the different processes of urbanization in the city's edge that precede the materiality of the city, the emergence of metabolic infrastructures of water, power, waste, etc. in the peri-urban constitute one of its most under-studied dynamic. Indian cities are increasingly 'outsourcing' their metabolic infrastructures to their peri-urban fringe, establishing a new form of social, material and political relationship between the urban and the peri-urban. Water treatment plants, drinking and wastewater canals, high-tension power lines, landfills, etc. render the peri-urban as a space saturated with the markers of urban metabolism. This displacement is driven by the logic of land prices in the city as well as the aesthetic of rendering urban metabolism subterranean or hidden from view (See Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2000).
According to general bureaucratic discourse, these infrastructures are supposed to constitute a claim by the city only on peri-urban land; compensated for by land acquisition rates. I argue, however, that these infrastructures also make a secondary claim on peri-urban nature. By looking at drinking-water and waste-water canals in the peri-urban villages bordering Gurgaon city, this research argues that metabolic infrastructures of water by processes of groundwater recharge, seepage, irrigation and theft produce an unintended second nature with often profound consequences for the predominantly agrarian livelihoods in conduit villages. The canal water that is produced for urban metabolism is implicated in the reconfiguration of socio-ecological relations in the peri-urban and in the production of a particular socio-nature.
E-paper: this Paper will not be presented, but read in advance and discussed