Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Andrew Dawson
(University of Melbourne)
Akhil Gupta (UCLA)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- Napier G04
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 13 December, -, -, Thursday 14 December, -
Time zone: Australia/Adelaide
Short Abstract:
Encompassing ethnographic investigations and theoretical reflections on roads, railways, water pipes, sewage systems, electricity grids, telephone lines, mobile phone towers, airports and the like, this panel considers the mediating and constituting roles of infrastructure in society and politics.
Long Abstract:
Infrastructure has emerged recently as an important field of study in the human sciences for at least three reasons. First, ageing infrastructure in the global North has been made increasingly visible through damage wrought by environmental and other extreme events. And, the invisibility of infrastructure has been metaphoric as well as literal. Even when infrastructures are not buried in the ground, or hidden behind false ceilings, they have been largely invisible to social researchers. Second, giant new infrastructure projects have been initiated increasingly in newly affluent countries such as China, India, and Brazil. Such projects make infrastructure visible as an index and icon of modernity. Third, especially in the context of climate change, there is an urgent need to understand and modify how people use water, energy, transport and other infrastructures. However, beyond such instrumental concerns lurks a larger and more interesting question, to do with how the relationship between people and infrastructure mediates their relation to other people, to sociality, and to politics. How are family ties, kin relations, senses of belonging, and political subjectivity and participation, etc. mediated by their relation to infrastructure? Indeed, we can go further and ask: How does infrastructure constitute social relationships and political participation? In the case of social media, the constitutive role of infrastructure in social life is quite apparent. But do roads, water pipes, telephone lines, and airports similarly constitute social life, and not just affect it from the outside? This panel, 'the everyday life of infrastructures' addresses such questions.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 12 December, 2017, -Paper short abstract:
The presentation will address three questions: 1. How power outage impacts everyday rhythm of life during Ramadan? 2. What are people's perceptions of temporality due to power- outage? 3. How studying power-outage helps understand Pakistani state.
Paper long abstract:
Early man relied on fire for the luxuries of light, heat, and cooking. Today, we take all these luxuries for granted. At the flick of a switch, a push of a button, or the turn of a knob, we can have instant power. Modernizing society through the provision of electricity to most was, therefore, one of the primary aims of postcolonial states such as Pakistan. Over time, however, such a promise has turned into a nightmare due to energy crisis leading to 12 to 16 hours of power outage in summer. The impact of power-outage on people's everyday life is significant. Especially, in the month of Ramadan in summer power outage leaves people to live at the mercy of nature leading to severe causalities. According to the government and hospital reports, more than 1,250 people die in the month of Ramadan due to the searing heat accompanied by the power outage. While living in modern cities, people are surrounded by medieval time. This presentation will demonstrate how the everyday rhythm of people's lives is impacted in the month of Ramadan in which the intersection of variables such as religion, climate, and power outage proves most devastating for citizens. The presentation will, therefore, address three broad questions:
1. How religion, climate, and power outage intersect with each other and impact people's everyday rhythm of life?
2. What are people's perceptions of temporality due to power- outage?
3. How studying the lack of infrastructure such as electricity impacting people's everyday life helps us understand the character of the Pakistani state.
Paper short abstract:
What happens when a form of infrastructure becomes defunct? In Britain, early industrial-era canal development was superseded by rail. Using the concept of 'edgelands', this paper explores canals as spaces of both decay and (re)creation.
Paper long abstract:
What happens when a form of infrastructure becomes defunct? Britain's early industrial-era canals were engineering feats. But, they were soon eclipsed by the bigger, faster feats of rail development. While railways became an industrial archetype, integral to the modern experience of space-time compression, canals, by contrast, became spaces of 'folkification'. Into the twentieth century, the increasing marginality of canals often led to disuse and closure. More recently, canals have been regenerated, becoming spaces of leisure and pleasure. In this paper, I offer a case study of the Rochdale Canal, Northern England, which opened in 1804, closed in 1952, and reopened in 2002. Using the concept of 'Edgelands', I explore how, as defunct infrastructure, canals have served as spaces for both decay and (re)creation.
Paper short abstract:
Considering the relationship between indigenous irrigation and socio-cultural relations, and the way development interventions concretize infrastructure, harden social 'facts', and black-box controversies, this paper argues they both constitute and impact social life, and reflect power relations.
Paper long abstract:
The Central Highlands of Madagascar is materially and symbolically shaped by indigenous rice terracing and irrigation infrastructure. Dating back centuries, they play a central organizing role in sustaining livelihoods, socio-cultural relations, identity and spiritual connections to the ancestors. More recently, development projects have concretized infrastructure in material terms, hardened (reduced, fixed, bracketed) 'facts' about social realities, and black-boxed controversies, contradictions and disconnects regarding their effects. Within dominant development imaginaries, technical (material, scientific, modern, gender-biased) meanings of infrastructure are privileged over the historical, social, cultural and political. Further, the social lives of development practitioners in defining, deploying, interpreting and giving meaning to development interventions are silenced. Within anthropology, these conceptualizations, together with the social life of infrastructure and engineers, have tended to be invisible and outside the frame of analysis. This paper sheds light on the way development infrastructure shapes material realities, and mediates socio-cultural and political relations, while recognizing that development practitioners distinguish between the 'technical' and 'social': infrastructure (read as 'science') proceeds in isolation from, or in spite of social factors (Latour 1979). Based on two years of multi-ethnographic fieldwork, it investigates disconnects in indigenous and 'engineered' dams and irrigation works in terms of material and social construction, overlapping histories, relations of power and influence, and the way they are lived, negotiated and contested in everyday practice from the perspectives of Betsileo farmers and development practitioners. In doing so, it illustrates the way infrastructure both constitutes and impacts social life, as well as reflects power relations and struggles over resources and meaning.
Paper short abstract:
This presentation grapples with the dilemmas involved in air travel, a growing source of greenhouse gas emissions, on the part of academics and explores strategies for confronting these dilemmas.
Paper long abstract:
Airplane flights are one of the fastest, perhaps even the fastest, growing source of greenhouse gas emissions, even though there is much discussion of mitigating emissions in order to stave off a global climate change disaster. While business people, politicians, celebrities, and highly affluent people appear to be the most frequent flyers, the demands of an increasingly corporatized university sector has placed much pressure on academics, including anthropologists, to fly in order to attend conferences and meetings and conduct research. I seek to grapple with the dilemmas involved in the academic use of aircraft, particularly on the part of those academics who accept the gravity of anthropogenic climate change, spurred on by the demands of global capitalism and propose some strategies for mitigating climate change on the part of particularly anthropologists as part of the larger project of creating an socio-ecological revolution that will potentially contribute to a safe climate.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines infrastructure through the world of infrastructure investment - the 'Infraspace'. The paper draws on ethnographic research from Colombo, London, Malé, and Singapore with public planners, capital financiers, development banks, and heads of government.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines infrastructure and the state by exploring the world of infrastructure investment, referred to by the industry as, 'Infraspace'. Starting with financial institutions and multilateral development agencies that steer global infrastructure money, it will trace the financial, technical, bureaucratic and diplomatic journey of an infrastructure project. Examining the economic, social, and political architecture of infrastructure investment and development pulls into focus the relationship between states, state owned enterprises, and multilateral financial institutions. Drawing on ethnographic research from Colombo, London, Malé, and Singapore with public planners, capital financiers, development banks, consultants and heads of government, the paper examines the diplomacy afforded through - and required within - international infrastructure development. Focussing specifically on the Maldives, the paper engages with two different regimes. The first, South Asia's longest dictatorship: a regime that did not make itself amenable to foreign investment, kept infrastructure development small in scale and centred around the capital, Malé. The Second regime, the Maldives' first democratically elected government: far less risk averse when it came to foreign investment, favoured an agenda of decentralisation, and implemented larger more ambitious infrastructure development projects. The paper examines the social life of infrastructure. Rather than focus primarily on the social and cultural consequences of infrastructural change, however, or whether the political promise and aspiration of infrastructure measures up to everyday use, the point of departure for this article is the social, economic, and political relations that produce infrastructure. Such an examination requires a journey beyond the state and through Infraspace.
Paper short abstract:
Water infrastructure governs human and other species' relations within ecosystems. Is it possible, through ethical design, to materialise and thus to promote principles of social and ecological justice? Can democracy and notions of the State be extended beyond human communities?
Paper long abstract:
As Wittfogel established in 1957, there is an intimate relationship between political power and the ownership and control of water. The capacity to direct fluid 'life' is literally essential to the functioning of the State. Water infrastructure materialises the process of governance, imposing onto human and non-human systems particular priorities about whose needs and interests will be met - and whose will not.
Drawing on ethical theories of human-non-human relations, and long-term research on rivers in Queensland, this paper explores how the materialities of water infrastructure constitute interspecies relations within ecosystems. Conventionally, ruled by dominant concepts of dualism, such infrastructure is envisaged as a tool of 'dominion' through which Nature/the non-human is directed (ie governed) to provide 'environmental services' for Culture/humankind. The result is unsustainable water use practices that override not only the needs and interests of less powerful human groups, but those of other, non-human communities.
This paper suggests that the achievement of more reciprocal and sustainable practices depends upon understanding how such material culture expresses and inculcates meanings, and a conscious effort to promote less anthropocentric infrastructural design. By doing so, can the State uphold and enact principles of social and ecological justice? Is it possible to 're-imagine communities' to conceive of a State that extends notions of democracy beyond human agency and interests? And can such paradigmatic changes be carried beyond and between States, for example by EU Directives, or the Principles for Water currently being composed by the UN?
Paper short abstract:
This paper argues that the political can most often be found in the technical and invisible details of everyday life. I explore the trans-local and political negotiations that northern Cypriots cope with vis-à-vis the Turkish state's interventions, in relation to water infrastructure.
Paper long abstract:
In July 2016, the pipes and taps of northern Cypriots started to flow with 'Turkish' water. The "Project of the Century" is a pipeline that runs under the Mediterranean Sea, bringing clean water from Turkey to northern Cyprus and supposedly relieving northern Cypriots' everyday struggles of getting by with scarce, bitter and salty water. Prior to the arrival of 'Turkish' water, the controversy around its management had already ensued which raises the following questions: how does infrastructure constitute political subjectivities, and how do its technicalities reproduce certain ways of governing?
Ever since the military occupation by Turkey in 1974 and establishment of the de-facto state Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus in 1983, Turkish financial and provisional aid programs have become indispensable for northern Cypriot society. The water pipeline and its privatization is yet another scheme that renders the blurred lines of governance and sovereignty more visible. I inquire into how (Turkish and Turkish Cypriot) engineers and technicians, public officials in and around the Water Works department(s), and certain public figures perceive the politics of the pipeline and management of the water. These ethnographic insights reveal a crucial element of infrastructures in general; that these highly technical networks of utility and materiality spotlight and reveal different layers of the socio-political context. Therefore, this paper will argue that infrastructures' logistical, technical, and governing components offer insights on how political organizations are undermined or consolidated, how competing viewpoints are negotiated, and how power structures around the webs of relations are reproduced.
Paper short abstract:
Focusing on anti-high speed rail protest in Valsusa, Alpine Italy, this paper highlights how infrastructures become foci of political contention. I describe how a 'local' infrastructural conflict is linked up with a critique of globalisation and gives rise to multifaceted political reconfiguration.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores how engineering infrastructures become foci of political contention in contemporary Europe. Specifically, it draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Valsusa, in Alpine Italy, with residents and activists resisting a high-speed railway construction project. Through this focus, the paper addresses the question of infrastructures' generative roles with regard to social and political relations. I argue that infrastructural conflicts can lead to complex reconfigurations of the political, offering a compelling field of study for political anthropology. The struggle in Valsusa, ongoing since the 1990s, is the most long-running and largest infrastructural conflict in present-day Europe. Contrary to common assumptions, protesters show the railway project is environmentally as well as economically unsustainable, and they denounce it as an expression of illicit interests linking figures in the Italian government to potent industrial and financial actors. Analysing this conflict, I highlight the production and dissemination of technical counter-expertise among activists and show how that knowledge becomes the basis for a political mobilisation that overcomes ideological and lifestyle divides among very diverse groups. The movement brings together mountain farmers and retired workers with liberal middle-class intellectuals and experts, as well as Catholic church-goers with communist squatters and various kinds of anarchists. New kinds of individual and collective militant subjectivities emerge, focused on direct action and a critique of the liberal public sphere and representative democracy. The contestation of the specific infrastructural project becomes a point of departure for constructing alternative models of socio-economic and ecological relationships across scales from the 'local' to the 'global'.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the experiences of workers and the role of the state as new automated technologies are introduced into the container terminals. The paper examines the struggles that shape infrastructure over both very short and very long time scales.
Paper long abstract:
Extraordinary developments in new technologies have sparked widespread concerns about the future of jobs and social inequality. This paper examines the experiences of workers and the role of the state as new automated technologies are introduced into the container terminals that are at the heart of global trade. It does so from a position of an engaged anthropologist who has spent six years working on union campaigns to preserve jobs and conditions on the Australian waterfront during the rapid introduction of new technologies. Interviews were also carried out with experienced workers in the midst of dealing with these changes. Automation has been fostered by fierce competition between companies. But this competition was forcefully implemented by the Australian government, which insisted on having three nearly identical container terminals adjacent to each other in its relatively small ports - a requirement that was neither necessary or sustainable. The paper takes a long view to examine massive port container terminal infrastructure in motion. What does infrastructural change mean for the people who work with it? Why does it happen? The paper also explores day-to-day struggles and relationships of power that shape how changes to infrastructure are implemented and what outcome is settled on.
Paper short abstract:
A cable car connecting two cities generated social tensions and initiated a chain of events motivated by people's need to make sense of the project of plurinationalism in their everyday lives. The cable car, built by the Bolivian state, served both to reject and to promote the government's project.
Paper long abstract:
Throughout my fieldwork in the neighboring cities La Paz and El Alto, I observed people's production of the cities as racially and socioculturally different and as materializing different bodies. In this paper I analyze how a new infrastructure project, a cable car connecting the cities, generated social tensions and uncovered, reiterated and contested this production.
The slogan of the Bolivian state-owned cable car company, "Uniting our lives", is literal in the sense of diminishing the space and travel time otherwise dividing people. However, this fusing caused tensions. On social media, inhabitants of an affluent residential area in La Paz commented on a perceived increase of "disorder" in the(ir) shopping mall. People they deemed belonged to El Alto, based on behavior and physical appearance, were said to increasingly visit the shopping mall. The commentators clearly connected the escalation to the new infrastructure. Geographically separate social worlds and racialized bodies, created historically and constituting the national body, were closing in on each other.
The comments on social media became public news and were criticized at the national level by politicians advocating the plurinational state. By considering the unfolding of events I argue that they are motivated by people's need to negotiate and make sense of the political project of plurinationalism in their everyday lives. Furthermore, I demonstrate how the introduction of new infrastructure is used both to reject, and as a strategy to promote, the political changes taking place. I draw on material gathered during twelve months in 2014-2015.
Paper short abstract:
Departing from an interdisciplinary and ethnographic study of asylum seeker reception centers in Norway, this paper explores the arrival infrastructures and accommodation as it shapes and challenges the ability for refugees to experience belonging and wellbeing in their new place for settlement.
Paper long abstract:
Departing from an interdisciplinary and ethnographic study of asylum seeker reception centres in Norway, this paper explores the arrival infrastructures and accommodation as it shapes the everyday interactions between refugees and the wider social fabric. Places and the related infrastructures are both catalysts and embodiments of societal change and includes both micro-local and macro-global transformations that rescale and reshape geographical space and the redrawing of the layout and social composition of places. Arrival infrastructures and residential environments do not only express cultural values, but also shape conditions for group- and individual identities and belonging, as well as active (inter)relations and interplay. This affects possibilities for just and equal influence and participation in political and civil associations, and access to education, work, health and social services, leisure activities and social networks. The paper argues that the structure and quality of asylum seekers’ arrival and accommodation become a mode of governing, and as such represent a “politics of discomfort”. More so, the paper emphasizes the ethic and aesthetic dimensions of infrastructures and built environment’s interplay in communicating social identity, stigma, power relations and citizenship. Belonging and identity are seen as created in the course of social life, rather than as an ‘ethnos’ often designated as a ‘biological fact’ that cannot be disputed. Thus, the paper highlights how arrival structures and residential environments require certain competences to develop a feeling of belonging and wellbeing, which challenge the ability for refugees and asylum seekers to experience such in their new place for settlement.