Roadwork: expertise at work building roads in the Maldives

Heslop, Luke; Jeffery, Laura

doi:10.1111/1467-9655.13236

Cited by 8 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 49 publications

(52 reference statements)

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“…Recent works from the anthropology of infrastructure offer a helpful corrective to accounts that cast water agencies like these as wholly coherent entities, highlighting the ongoing, often messy and piecemeal work that goes into sustaining flows within these networks (Anand, 2017; Barnes, 2014; De Coss-Corzo, 2020). As in recent ethnographies of road building (Harvey and Knox, 2015; Heslop, 2020), this body of scholarship demonstrates civil engineering practice as a situated mixture of applying standardized technical expertise and negotiating local conditions, including political frictions. Such perspectives are particularly useful to keep in mind when considering how decades of growing public discontent with these powerful agencies might shape how those employed within them understand these institutions.…”

Section: Water Power Hope and Nostalgiamentioning

confidence: 89%

Missing power: Nostalgia and disillusionment among Southern California water engineers

Randle¹

2021

Critique of Anthropology

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California’s sprawling network of aqueducts and dams is often cited as the embodiment of a high-modernist approach to resource management. But while once widely celebrated, in recent decades this infrastructural system and the institutions that manage it have been the subject of growing criticism and shrinking funding streams. Based on ethnographic research among employees at several California water agencies, this article explores the sense of nostalgia and diminished power experienced by the workers tasked with overseeing these networks. These emic perspectives are frequently articulated in the form of unfavorable comparisons to an imagined past, when the workers believe that their agencies were better resourced and civil engineers’ technical expertise was more respected by the public that they served. Analyzing these stories of declining influence and capacity, the article shows how understandings of individual and institutional power can be conditioned by past paradigms of regional development and technocratic statecraft.

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Section: Water Power Hope and Nostalgiamentioning

confidence: 89%

Missing power: Nostalgia and disillusionment among Southern California water engineers

Randle¹

2021

Critique of Anthropology

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“…In 2016, management of the Laamu link road was transferred from the Chinese contractors JTEG to the MRDC, a relatively young state corporation (see Heslop and Jeffery 2020). This marks an important transition in the life of a road from construction to maintenance.…”

Section: Chinese Construction and Maldivian Managementmentioning

confidence: 99%

7 Encountering Chinese development in the Maldives. Gifts, hospitality, and rumours

Heslop¹,

Jeffery²

2021

Highways and Hierarchies

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This chapter examines the longest and most developed road in the Maldives archipelago, a fifteen-kilometre-long link road connecting four islands of the Laamu (or Haddummati) Atoll. In the planning phase, there were tensions between those who argued that the road should connect houses to the school and the mosque and those who argued that the road should connect the harbour to the market. Such appeals, bifurcated along gender lines, reflect local mobility concerns and were tied to existing political rifts between the four islands that were intensified by the appearance of a new infrastructural asset. The built road facilitates a multitude of local encounters as people travel further and more regularly, but it is also through the road that islanders encounter the global forces of capital and construction that shape their islands. The Laamu link road was a 'gift' from the Chinese government, constructed by the Jiangsu Transportation Engineering Group (JTEG), and amidst local mobility concerns and inter-island politics swirl rumours and hearsay of land grabs and international power struggles between China, India, the US, and Saudi Arabia. This chapter, as well as being an ethnographic exposition of Chinese infrastructure development in a South Asian archipelago, explores the road as a social experience as it crosscuts competing visions of modernity, global connectivity, and anxiety about material change on remote coral atolls in the Indian Ocean. Foreign encounters and changing infrastructureApproximately 67 million years ago, the tectonic plate of what is now the Indian subcontinent drifted northward over a particularly hot part of the Earth's mantle, stretching from Reunion to the Deccan Traps of India, and sprouted a row of volcanoes, which later cooled and subsided. For millennia, coral has grown atop this sunken oceanic plateau, the Chagos-Lakshadvip (formerly Laccadive) volcanic ridge, which stretches from the Chagos Archipelago to the Lakshadvip Sea off the coast of Kerala. 1 As the volcanoes subsided, they left upwardly growing fringing coral that had formed around the peaks where they touched the surface of the water (Darwin 1842). Fringing coral and calcified sediment became sandbanks in the ocean, which eventually bore vegetation and became habitable. 2 The outlines of these sunken volcanoes form the distinctive crescent shapes of the 26 coralline atolls that comprise the Maldives archipelago today. 3 Currently the Maldives national 1 Today, the ridge lies at a depth of 1000 m below sea level, bounded by waters which drop to an oceanic floor of 2500 m on the east side and 4000 m on the west (see Forbes 1980;Rufin-Soler et al. 2014). 2 The current layer of Maldives reefs began forming at the top of this coral platform about 7500 years ago (Kench et al. 2009). 3 Fuvahmula is the archipelago's only single island atoll without a lagoon.

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“…The emphasis on skilful performances follows a tradition that has highlighted varieties of 'experience-based expertise' vs. 'certified expertise'(Collins and Evans 2002); or what Boyer(Boyer 2008), p. 40 calls the "experiential-performative" pole of "skilled knowing and doing" by contrast with the "social-institutional" pole; or, what is sometimes still referred to as 'lay expertise' vis-à-vis 'epistemic expertise', see(Turnhout, Tuinstra, and Halfmann 2019). 10 Let me single out some key aspects of this tradition of studies that matter for my discussion here.The literature on expertise has flourished in the so-called 'Third Wave of Science Studies-Studies of Expertise and Experience (SEE)'(Collins and Evans 2002), but also in the anthropology and ethnography of experts-see (T Mitchell 2002),(Jeffery and Heslop 2020)…”

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confidence: 99%

From the Right to Science as an Epistemic-Cultural Human Right to the Right to Expertise

Massimi

2024

Expertise

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I discuss the Right to Science originally recognised by the United Nations (UN) Declaration of Human Rights (UNDHR) in 1948 and subsequently embedded in the International Covenant for Economic Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) in 1966 (henceforth abbreviated as REBSP). My aim is twofold. First, I give the philosophical arguments for taking REBSP as an epistemic-cultural human right, namely a right concerning scientific knowledge (episteme in ancient Greek) qua part of wider cultural practices. Second, I articulate a notion of expertise that can do the philosophical heavy-lifting for interpreting REBSP as an epistemic-cultural human right. Drawing on my work on perspectival realism, I present two varieties of inter-perspectival expertise and show how they underpins a Right to Expertise that—I contend—is a natural supplement to the REBSP understood as an epistemic-cultural human right.

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Roadwork: expertise at work building roads in the Maldives

Cited by 8 publications

References 49 publications

Missing power: Nostalgia and disillusionment among Southern California water engineers

Missing power: Nostalgia and disillusionment among Southern California water engineers

7 Encountering Chinese development in the Maldives. Gifts, hospitality, and rumours

From the Right to Science as an Epistemic-Cultural Human Right to the Right to Expertise

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