---With apologies for cross-posting---
Dear all,
Please see below a call for abstracts for Panel 10 "Everyday infrastructural negotiations: Ordinary people and exceptional struggles in the Southern cities context" at next year's RC21 Conference in Athens, Greece, Aug 24-26, 2022.
Conveners:
León Felipe Téllez Contreras, The University of Sheffield, UK
Debapriya Chakrabarti, The University of Manchester, UK
The presence of infrastructure has often been associated with the notion of development and shaping the everyday lives of people associated with these. On the one hand, exceptionally few “first world-class” infrastructures are used as emblems of globality for a small number of cities. On the other hand, the ordinary conditions of a large number of cities are described in terms of infrastructural absence, failure, and poverty (Amin & Thrift, 2018). Moreover, infrastructure remains fragmented, as has been widely discussed in relation to Southern cities (Amin, 2014; Simone, 2004). Infrastructure provision, maintenance and transformation is contested and immensely politicised, where factors such as gender, class, caste, religion, informality and marginality play a key role (Datta & Ahmed, 2020; Fredericks, 2018). It is important therefore to understand the human-infrastructure interactions in their complexity (Angelo & Hentschel, 2015), as infrastructure could be both enriching and exclusionary.
Urban infrastructures are central in shaping our understandings of the exceptionality and ordinariness of cities. The moral and political attributes of exceptionality and ordinariness are both used to define the infrastructures themselves and the people associated with them. Thus, ordinary people adapt, appropriate and negotiate with broken infrastructural systems and networks.
In this session, we aim to problematise the everyday negotiations and interactions of ordinary people whose lives and livelihoods are impacted by infrastructure or the lack thereof. We welcome papers focusing on lived experiences of ordinary people and/or documenting their exceptional struggles in places of disjointed infrastructures. Contributions can be on but not limited to the following themes:
• the economic, political, social, and cultural logics that render both urban infrastructures and actors as ordinary or exceptional;
• the everyday discourses and practices that shape the ordinariness and exceptionality of infrastructures and cities; and
• the implications of disjointed infrastructures in (re)shaping people’s informal practices and livelihoods.
Please submit your abstract (max 300 words) by January 31st, 2022 directly on the RC21 website: https://pcoconvin.eventsair.com/rc21/call-for-abstracts
Best wishes,
Debapriya and Leon
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Dr Debapriya Chakrabarti (she/her)
ESRC Fellow
School of Environment, Education and Development
The University of Manchester
Twitter: DebapriyaChak11
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