A light lunch will be served and work will be pre-circulated – please RSVP by end of day April 20 if you plan to attend.
This workshop will focus on the concept of “infrastructural biography” as a research method for examining infrastructure in its social, environmental, political, economic, and material contexts. Focusing on the visible transformations of specific infrastructural forms over time (homes, schools, roads, buildings, bridges, pipelines, transmission lines, for example), offers an entrée into understanding sociopolitical complexity and change for the people who live with these elements of the built environment. Participants will read some of Sara Shneiderman’s existing work and listen to a presentation of material from one chapter of her current ethnography in process, Restructuring Life: Conflict, Disaster, and Transformation in Nepal, which uses infrastructural biography as a framing concept. Discussion will be focused on how this approach might be useful across disciplines.
In the presentation, Shneiderman will focus on the infrastructural biography of hydropower transmission towers in rural Nepal to address the question: How does hydropower development reshape landscapes and livelihoods far away from the flow of water itself? Much critical scholarship has addressed riverine environmental impacts and the often-devastating outcomes of dam-related displacement for downstream communities, as well as the mobilization of resistance to these developments. Her research builds on such work to ask how the transnational flows of materiality, expertise, and capital that accompany large-scale infrastructural development can transform rural communities situated along lines of hydropower transmission at a distance from power-generating rivers and dams themselves. Shneiderman presents a case study of an Indigenous community in Dolakha, Nepal, whose fields and forests have over the last decade become host to lines of transmission from multiple hydropower projects that originate near the northern border between Nepal and China’s Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR). At source, these power-generating installations serve as meeting points for people, ideas, and things from all over the Himalayan region, as Chinese and Indian engineers and administrators, Tibetan pilgrims and Nepali contract labourers, mingle in unexpected ways to produce the actual flow of water. The resulting energy that flows through the network of towers to reach its final destination—usually India or Bangladesh— brings diverse communities along the way into relation with the material, political, and economic transformations of hydropower development. The case study explores how community members living along lines of transmission conceptualize their own geographical and social location in relation to the ongoing transformations that hydropower development brings.
Bio
Sara Shneiderman is Ivan Head South-North IDRC Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and School of Public Policy & Global Affairs at UBC. She is a sociocultural anthropologist who has worked in Nepal and the Himalayas for over 30 years. Her recent research focuses on post-disaster reconstruction and infrastructural development; she has recently co-edited the volume “Infrastructures of Democracy: Politics and Processes of Road Building in Rural Nepal.”
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
