Between decay and repair: Embodied experiences of infrastructure's materiality

Ramakrishnan, Kavita; O’Reilly, Kathleen; Budds, Jessica

doi:10.1177/2514848620980597

Cited by 12 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 15 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Others have commented on this gap (Buckley, 2018), including those working on the relations between humans and non-humans in digitally mediated cities (Rose, 2017) and on characterising the emergence of a broader posthuman moment (Braidotti, 2013). While largely in agreement with these assessments, we also recognise the recent and growing body of infrastructural scholarship that centres its analysis around labour (Addie, 2021; De Coss-Corzo, 2021; Stokes and Lawhon, 2022) and infrastructural practice (Barnes, 2017; Denis and Pontille, 2014, 2015; Ramakrishnan et al, 2021). We suggest this is an important moment for assessing the increasing, yet often dislocated engagement with labour within infrastructural geographies.…”

Section: What Is (And Isn’t) Infrastructure?supporting

confidence: 59%

“…The study of repair and maintenance practices has become an area of particular interest within social science and geographic studies of infrastructure (Barnes, 2017; Carr, 2022; Jambadu et al, 2023; Ramakrishnan et al, 2021; Velho and Ureta, 2019). These works have highlighted the relevance of labour in sustaining not only infrastructures but also the relations that they enable.…”

Section: Locating Infrastructural Labourmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Doing the work: Locating labour in infrastructural geography

Stokes

Coss‐Corzo

2023

Progress in Human Geography

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

As the social sciences undergo an infrastructural turn, geographers have taken steps to broaden, disrupt, and reconceptualise understandings of infrastructure and its relationship to social, political, economic, and ecological processes. We contribute to this discussion by highlighting the emergence of a comparatively understudied yet crucial aspect within infrastructural geographies – infrastructural labour. We identify key theoretical anchors that guide contemporary analyses of infrastructural labour, which we query by focusing on five key areas of scholarly discussion. Building on these, we offer a working definition of infrastructural labour to help guide further engagement and point to questions meriting additional investigation.

show abstract

Section: What Is (And Isn’t) Infrastructure?supporting

confidence: 59%

Section: Locating Infrastructural Labourmentioning

confidence: 99%

Doing the work: Locating labour in infrastructural geography

Stokes

Coss‐Corzo

2023

Progress in Human Geography

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This approach thus enriches critiques of exclusionary urban development by enabling a grounded analysis of the ways that urban environmental governance and class-biased pursuits of urban greening can constrain and cause harm to marginalized urban inhabitants. This work thus advocates for reparative and incremental approaches to sustainable urban development and SWM practice (Bhan, 2019; Bhan et al, 2020; Lawhon et al, 2014; Ramakrishnan et al, 2021), starting with already existing forms of labour involved in cleaning up the city.…”

Section: Conceptual Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Finally, emerging from these embodied complexities, this study contributes to the re-imagining of more equitable urban futures by starting from what already exists. Emerging scholarship on reparative urbanisms advocate for incremental approaches and reparative relations that centre and begin with the real and tacit ways in which people individually and collectively navigate work and life in the urban margins (Bhan, 2019; Bhan et al, 2020; Lawhon et al, 2014; Ramakrishnan et al, 2021). An embodied UPE of marginalized waste labour can thus contribute to this reparative project by re-imagining waste management systems that privilege the infrastructural labours that already exist, rather than invisibilizing them.…”

Section: Conclusion: Embodying Waste Work In the ‘Clean City’mentioning

confidence: 99%

Dirty work in the clean city: An embodied Urban Political Ecology of women informal recyclers’ work in the ‘clean city’

Wittmer

2022

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper investigates the ways that ‘cleaning up’ Indian cities impacts those who rely on accessing waste on city streets for their livelihoods. I focus on low-income Dalit women recyclers in Ahmedabad, India as they navigate material and discursive shifts in urban waste management emanating from the national Swachh Bharat Abhiyan and 2016 Solid Waste Management Rules, and the municipal privatization and mechanization of solid waste management practice. The study is informed by 10 months of ethnographic research and a series of interviews and group discussions with women recyclers between 2016 and 2018. Using a feminist embodied Urban Political Ecology approach, I suggest the imagining and production of the ‘clean and green’ world-class city is affecting Dalit women recyclers’ work in two ways. First, I argue that emerging cleanliness governance mechanisms and solid waste management practices are re-spatializing and masculinizing waste labour in the city. I show how spatial, discursive and temporal shifts in solid waste management are producing new challenges for Dalit women recyclers in accessing waste, intensifying their physical and financial burdens and requiring more precarious adaptations to generate daily incomes. Second, I explore women recyclers’ own clean city aspirations, expressing a desire to experience the ‘clean and green’ city and a simultaneous sense of betrayal as their livelihoods, communities and bodies are excluded from its imagining and material production. I suggest that an embodied intersectional analysis of waste labour reveals how the imagining and production of clean and sustainable ‘modern’ cities can cause damage to socially marginalized and gendered bodies as they are displaced from work and denied the substantive experience of urban citizenship in the ‘world-class’ city. Attention to embodiment thus deepens an understanding of the complexities and contradictions invoked in urban environmental governance and infrastructural transformations, informing the imagining and production of more equitable and reparative urban futures.

show abstract

“…Moving away from notions of the body as either a passive vessel of macro political forces or a humanist trope of personal control and volition, an embodied UPE recognizes the ‘multiple, interconnected relations of difference and power’ ( Doshi, 2017 , p. 126) that shape how bodies are made to appear and be recognizable, disgruntled and bemoaned, punished and pleasured, or even violated and erased. Thus, the body's materiality and the space it inhabits are kept in place, not only by the city's mega-infrastructures, but by ‘the social codes and relations that keep the body connected to infrastructure, or demand particular types and/or certain divisions of labour, often reinforcing or remaking gendered, classed and/or racialized lines’ ( Ramakrishnan et al, 2020 , p. 2).…”

Section: Bodies-in-waiting and The Shifting Ecology Of The Body-citymentioning

confidence: 99%

Bodies-in-waiting as infrastructure: Assembling the Philippine Government's disciplinary quarantine response to COVID-19

Canoy

Robles

Roxas

2022

Social Science & Medicine

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The purpose of this article is to advance the concept of bodies-in-waiting as an everyday infrastructure to explain the shifting nature of ‘pandemic cities’ in response to the changing dynamics of infection control in urban spaces. While previous literatures have been ‘sanitized’ to emphasize the importance of managing optimal physiological health and safety, we would like to argue that keener attention is needed to rethink the constitutive role of bodies in co-producing a city's sociopolitical ecologies at this time of crisis. The main body is divided into three sections. The first section introduces the political dimensions of pandemic response by various governments with an emphasis to experiences of middle to low income countries. Our intention is to show how these studies bring into light the role of local politics of pandemic response within countries, and that actual governance mechanisms in cities are shaped and contested by shifting power blocs and emergent affinities. The second section forwards an embodied urban political approach that conceptualizes bodies-in-waiting as infrastructure. In this view, bodies-in-waiting is produced and reproduced by complex social-material flows and transformation rooted in variegated matrices of power through which urban spaces are (re)assembled. The last section demonstrates a sample case that shows how bodies-in-waiting as infrastructure are understood using Twitter-sourced data associated with the Philippine government's disciplinary quarantine measures which started March 12, 2020 in the NCR. At its core, bodies-in-waiting as infrastructures populate a politically affirmative urban imaginary of bodies living on despite the existence of an accelerated and mutating virus in slower moving cities.

show abstract

Between decay and repair: Embodied experiences of infrastructure's materiality

Cited by 12 publications

References 15 publications

Doing the work: Locating labour in infrastructural geography

Doing the work: Locating labour in infrastructural geography

Dirty work in the clean city: An embodied Urban Political Ecology of women informal recyclers’ work in the ‘clean city’

Bodies-in-waiting as infrastructure: Assembling the Philippine Government's disciplinary quarantine response to COVID-19

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About