2022
22.06.2022,
Andrea Ballestero (University of Southern California): Aquifers: Ethnography and Responsibility at the Edge of a Concept
2022
11.05.2022, Andrew Barry, Evelina Gambino (University College London): The Labour of Capitalisation
This
lecture seeks to engage with recent debates around the capitalisation of
infrastructure by interrogating how capitalized futures are both fixed and
destabilised in the present. We understand the capitalisation of infrastructure
as a project aimed at extracting future profit into the present. Rather than a
smooth process, capitalisation is sustained by all manners of efforts that
bridge between the future, the present and the past. In particular, we argue
that there is a need to attend to the specific forms of specialist labour going
into the capitalisation of infrastructural projects which we term the labour of
capitalisation, which is expected to stabilise or fix the future and to render
it predictable and manageable, acting on and through time. The lecture draws on
the fieldwork that we have undertaken, together and independently, across three
of the major infrastructural projects that have sustained developmental
trajectory of the Republic of Georgia since its independence. In the cases we
outline, and others, the capitalisation of infrastructure gives rise to diverse
types of anti-capitalisation, destabilising or disrupting the performance of
the different forms of labour on which capitalisation relies.
2022
20.04.2022, Christopher Kelty (UCLA): Fixing the Future in Los Angeles or, Why Johnny Can't Problematize
This talk
reports some absurdities of environmental governance in a particular place: Los
Angeles, California. It focuses on three urban ecological and wildlife
controversies: the environmental impact of feral cats cared for by humans, the
secondary effects of anticoagulant rodenticides on predatory and scavenging
birds and mammals; and the restoration of a wetlands sacred to local Native
American peoples, degraded by both oil drilling and conservation. Central to
all of them are techno-political tools: environmental impact reports,
mitigation bank and credits systems, pesticide registration review. Each of
these tools fix the future by defining the present and testing the impacts of
different futures--evidence-based policy making. Yet as a pragmatic form, they
do much more: they slow down the future in some ways, and speed it up in
others; they instantiate certain pasts over others, and they become intense
affective fields around which the possibility of argument unfolds. I argue that
this does not always happen along predictable lines, serving as a bulwark
against a damaging future in some cases and a roadblock to a desired change in
others.
2022
Fixing Futures
20 April : Christopher Kelty (University of California, Los Angeles)
Fixing the Future in Los Angeles or, Why Johnny Can't Problematize
11 May: Andrew Barry, Evelina Gambino (University College London)
The Labour of Capitalism
22 June: Andrea Ballestero (University of Southern California)
Aquifers and Ethnography at the Edge of a Concept
13 July: Lucy Suchman (Lancaster Unicersity)
Demilitarisation, open worlds, and reparative futures
Mittwoch, 18:00 - 20:00 (MEZ)
Campus Westend, Seminarhaus, SH 2.105 und online!
Bitte unter ka-hiwis@em.uni-frankfurt.de anmelden