[Sci-tech-public] Upcoming Anthropology Talks

[Irene Hartford]

The Anthropology Program is having three talks over the next week beginning tomorrow  that we hope will be of interest to you.  Please join us for these talks.

ANTHROPOLOGY SPECIAL TALKS
All talks will take place in E53-354



Friday, January 31st at 3:00 PM

NIKHIL ANAND, Ph.D.
Wolfensohn Family Member, School of Social Science
Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton

ScareCities: The Political Infrastructure of Water in Mumbai

Abstract:  In this paper I draw attention to the dangers of “scarcity talk” that frequently accompany accounts of “planetary urbanization”.  Through ethnographic work conducted with city water engineers, and settler communities in Mumbai, I suggest that scarcity talk produces ecologies of fear that are especially powerful in denying water to the city’s precarious populations.  Next, as precarious populations are not permitted water connections, I attend to the infrapolitical negotiations through which million of settlers have established access to water in the city, by working with their public city councilors and private plumbers.  Finally, in the third section of the talk I show how Muslim settlers are increasingly being disconnected from the city’s municipal water system through the quotidian practices of state officials.  Taken together, an attention to the everyday practices around water supply reveals how political authority, water infrastructure and substantive citizenship are iteratively made and managed in vibrant, contested and democratic cities.


Monday, February 3rd at 1:00 PM

AUSTIN ZEIDERMAN, Ph.D.
Research Fellow, London School of Economics and Political Science

Submergence: Fluid Futures in Colombia’s Presumptive Port City

Abstract:  This talk examines future imaginaries in the rapidly expanding port-city of Buenaventura on Colombia’s Pacific Coast, and the territorial conflicts they engender.  These conflicts hinge on three major transformations looming large on the horizon: forecasts of free trade and economic development motivate plans for turning Buenaventura into a “world-class” port; projections of sea-level rise and increased flood risk underpin climate change adaptation policies in zones of pronounced vulnerability; and competition for sovereign control over strategically important areas lead to violent clashes between criminal gangs and state security forces.  These interrelated transformations converge on the waterfront shantytown of Bajamar (meaning ”low-tide”) built and inhabited by Afro-Colombian settlers and refugees. It is here that activists and residents fight to defend their territories against the threat of forced displacement. Focusing on struggles over land and housing in the seaside settlements of Bajamar, this talk will reveal how economic, ecological, and political futures come to shape the city and the lives of its inhabitants.  Ultimately, the socio-material conditions of the intertidal zone, and in particular the figure of “submergence”, allow me to reflect upon forms of political life specific to this volatile and uncertain world.


Friday, February 7th at 12:00 Noon

NICHOLAS D’AVELLA, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society
University of California, Berkeley

Ecologies of Investment: Crisis Histories and Brick Futures in Argentina

Abstract:  In this talk I describe an ecological approach to investment in Argentina, which involves seeing investments as part of an emergent web of relations among constitutive and constituting parts.  Such a sensibility is an important feature of Argentine economic life, in which no investment is treated like any other.  Care about attributing equivalence and attention to the relationality of investments was also central to how people worked to save their savings in the aftermath of the Argentine economic crisis of 2001.  However, Argentines are not just invested in dollars and pesos, bank accounts and cash; they are also invested in their economic past.  As a result, the history of Argentine economic life is under a constant process of (re)narration, as Argentines reflect upon their rocky economic past in films, memoir, comic monologues, and stories told among family and friends.  I follow Argentines in attending to the past as a means to engage current ecologies of investment, paying particular attention to the history of currency and banking in Argentina, which together helped produce a boom in real estate investment in the years following the crisis.  I suggest how thinking in this way about investments could be useful for looking beyond global descriptions of the economy.

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