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Theme: 8. Negotiating Margins: Power, Agencies, Representations, Resistances
Anna Reumert, n/a
The New School, United States
Gregory Valdespino
University of Iowa, United States
Gregory Valdespino
University of Iowa, United States
Anna Reumert, n/a
The New School, United States
Kristen Miller
City University of New York, United States
Julie Kleinman
Fordham University, United States
This roundtable considers how social infrastructures across Africa and India have become central sites of accumulation and appropriation by international corporations, military powers, NGOs, and governments, and explores how people respond to and engage with this invasive valorization of their lives. The supposed portability of socio-technical infrastructures—bureaucratic policies, urban plans, experimental models, and communications technologies—sat at the center of ideas of state-formation since the rise of developmentalist thinking in the 1940s. As states have been reassembled in various ways under conditions of neoliberalization, this modernist vision of the state as the primary institution of socio-technical organization has come under strain. The governance of everyday life has been redistributed under changing state formations, raising fundamental questions regarding the constitution of social and political belonging. In light of these changed conditions, we query how novel institutional forms (both state and non-state) draw on globally circulating models and technologies to govern social infrastructures, on the one hand, and how these same entities leverage social infrastructures to consolidate their power, on the other. How are (im)mobilities generated at the interface of corporate and bureaucratic power, and how is social reproduction valorized through these processes? From rural India to urban Kenya, we examine how experimental models of philanthropic funding in public health rely on a model that both targets local grassroots needs, and transports it transnationally. Also in Kenya, Safaricom has used M-Pesa to profit from the social infrastructures and “phatic labor” of its users. We look to Sudan, where Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet service has entered the war, and belligerents are fighting over the control of its distribution, making “people as infrastructure” and human mobility into bargaining chips. Moving to Dakar, where the post-war suburban housing programs undertaken by the Société Immobilière du Cap Vert sought to create new physical spades to forge a loyal and productive professional class, we examine ongoing critiques of the neoliberal Senegalese regime’s inability to meet the needs of the people once seen as the country’s future leaders. Finally, looking to horizons for how people resist the state’s hold on their lives, we go on collective bike rides in Johannesburg, through which young Black men transcend and remap the city’s racist geography into spaces of freedom. We move across these scales of the institutional and the everyday to interrogate how people respond to and engage with efforts to govern their lifeworlds across continents.
Roundtable supported by: Zolberg Institute for Mobility and Migration, The New School for Social Research