| Date | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Friday, January 31, 2014 | 2:00PM - 4:00PM | Seminar Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs 1 Devonshire Place |
This roundtable takes up infrastructure as a key site of methodological and theoretical innovation for critical development studies. The panelists will comment on approaches to interrogating infrastructures from different disciplinary perspectives, and based on long-term engagements with different South (and Southeast) Asian worlds. Their perspectives depart from conventional ‘impact studies’ that connote the teleologies of modernization.
Road building and automobility in particular express a powerful modernist aspiration for democracy and improvement through enhanced accessibility, mobility and aesthetics, and constitute a special focus of the panel. The panel will take up the kinds of questions that could help forge an approach to studying infrastructure-in-the-making. What competing governance projects assemble to build the road? What labor processes are enrolled? What cultures of entrepreneurship, market relations, and sociality are facilitated or diminished? What economic, political, and cultural subjectivities predominate? How does road building articulate cultural ideologies of caste, gender, ethnicity and class? What sensory and affective modes do roads and automobility enable? And what methodologies are best suited to interrogating infrastructure, as both complicit in prevailing hegemonies, while also harboring possibilities for critical insight?
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