[Urbanstudy] CSH-CPR urban workshop, 24 February, Lisa Bjorkman

[Bhanu Joshi]

Dear All,

As part of our Urban Workshop Series, the Centre for Policy Research
(CPR) and Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH), Delhi, are delighted to
invite you to a Workshop on Pipe Politics: Contested infrastructures
of Millenial Mumbai by Lisa Bjorkman, Transregional Research Network,
University of Gottingen.


Date:               Tuesday, 24 February 2015
Time:               3.45 p.m.

Venue:             Conference Hall, Centre for Policy Research, Dharma
Marg, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi 110 021

In the Indian city of Mumbai, two dazzling decades of urban
development and roaring economic growth have presided over the steady
deterioration - and sometimes spectacular breakdown - of the city's
water infrastructures. Water troubles plague not only the more-than
60% of city residents now reported to live in 'slums,' but city elites
as well have seen their taps grow increasingly erratic and prone to
drying up. The everyday risks of water shortage that infuse the city's
water infrastructures- risks that flow across class lines - are
managed and mitigated through the forging and maintenance of elaborate
knowledge-exchange networks. Getting water to come out of Mumbai's
pipes is an activity that requires continuous attention to and
intimate knowledge of a complex and dynamic social and political
hydraulic landscape. Ethnographic attention reveals how water is made
to flow by means of intimate forms of knowledge and ongoing
intervention in the city's complex and dynamic social, political, and
hydraulic landscape. The everyday work of getting water animates and
inhabits a penumbra of infrastructural activity - of business,
brokerage, secondary markets and socio-political networks - whose
workings are transforming lives as well as reconfiguring and rescaling
political authority in the city. Mumbai's illegible and volatile
hydrologies are lending infrastructures increasing political salience
just as actual control over pipes and flows becomes contingent upon
dispersed and intimate assemblages of knowledge, power, and material
authority.

Lisa Björkman is a research scholar at the University of Göttingen's
Transregional Research Network (CETREN) in Germany. Her work studies
how global processes of urbanism and urban transformation are
redrawing lines of socio-spatial exclusions and inclusions in Mumbai,
animating new arenas of political mobilization, contestation and
representation Lisa's forthcoming book (Duke University Press 2015),
Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of
Millennial Mumbai, which was awarded the American Institute of Indian
Studies' 2014 Book Prize in the Indian Social Sciences, is a political
ethnography about the encounter in Mumbai between market-oriented
urban development reforms and the  material politics of the city's
water infrastructures.  Lisa received a PhD in Politics from the New
School for Social Research in New York in 2011.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is the sixty first in a series of Urban Workshops planned by the
Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH), New Delhi and Centre for Policy
Research (CPR). These workshops seek to provoke public discussion on
issues relating to the development of the city and try to address all
its facets including its administration, culture, economy, society and
politics. For further information, please contact: Jayani Bonnerjee at
jayani.bonnerjee at csh-delhi.com, Partha Mukhopadhyay at
partha at cprindia.org or Marie-Hélène Zerah at marie-helene.zerah at ird.fr

If you want your name deleted from the mailing list, send an email at
<urban_dynamics-unsubscribe at csh-delhi.com>. To subscribe to the list,
send an email at <urban_dynamics-subscribe at csh-delhi.com>

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

We look forward to welcoming you to CPR for what promises to be an
interesting discussion. Please feel free to share this invitation with
friends and colleagues who may be interested.

-- 
Bhanu Joshi
Mob: +91 9999 428 096
Twitter: @beejoshi
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Urban Workshop_bjorkman.pdf
Type: application/pdf
Size: 68277 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mail.mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup_mail.sarai.net/attachments/20150217/386f39e8/attachment-0001.pdf>