Infrastructure, Maintenance, and Waste in a Myanmar Hospital by Nora Wuttke
Design by okb-buro.com Hand sketches shown in with this article are by the author from her fieldwork in Yangon in 2020. All images copyright by Nora Wuttke. The…
Tag: infrastructure
Mobilizing Cemeteries, Representing Ancestors: The Infrastructure of Protest and the Anti-Petroleum Complex Movement in Pengerang, Malaysia
Resisting the “Rotterdam Port of the East” In 2011, the prime minister of Malaysia, Najib Razak, and the CEO of the national oil company Petronas, Shamsul Azhar Abbas,…
MyKnet.org: Traces of digital decoloniality in an indigenous web-based environment
This blog post is a shorter version of a paper presented at the Engaging with Web Archives (EWA20) conference in September 2020 (Book of Abstracts). Budka, P. (2020).…
Wounded Attachments: Intimacy, Infrastructure, and Harm in the National Public Hospital by Livia Garofalo
The first thing you see from the highway is a massive building. The Hospital is simply enormous. In front of the Hospital plaza is a roundabout. In the…
The ICT Poverty Trap: How Technology Disparities Exacerbate the Spread of Disease and Division in Jamaica
A view of the street side in Kingston, Jamaica’s capital. A leaning telecommunications tower, symbolic of the island’s deficient ICT infrastructure, separates the stalls of informal street vendors…
Connectedness in a Time of Pandemic
Right now, many of us are reevaluating what it means to be connected. In the United States, we often think of connectivity as having wireless broadband service, or…
Water #Failures and Social Housing
Public and media discourses about housing estates are replete with highly problematic narratives of failure, riddled with classed and racialised tropes that cast estates, and especially modernist high…
Clouds of Failure
Anticipating the failure of digital devices has become part of the fabric of everyday life in the digital world. With their fragile components and ever-shortening lifespans, digital technologies…
#Failures: When things don’t hold: Anthropologies of failure, breakdown, and dysfunction
The fragility of our infrastructures and modes of living seldom become as ubiquitously palpable as they have with the current COVID-19 pandemic. The spread of the corona virus…
Heat and Covid-19 in the Off-Grid City by Nausheen Anwar
Amidst almost unstoppable contagion, many hung their hopes on heat and humidity as a potential defence against contracting Covid-19 in the early months of the pandemic. Early studies…
Managing Refugee Mobilities: Global Flows of Migration Deterrence Technologies
In 2000, a United Nations Resolution designated June 20th World Refugee Day. In the week leading up to this day, countries throughout the world pay homage to the…
#Afterlives: Ghosts of Infrastructures Past
Some miles outside a small Welsh town, off the main road, a long, flat structure rises from the undergrowth. Ivy and weed smother brick. The shape is familiar,…
Africa, Laboratory Equipment and COVID-19 Response by Louise Bezuidenhout
As the world struggles to address the COVID-19 crisis, attention increasingly turns to laboratories and the crucial role that they play in diagnostics and research. A rising number…
Futures and the past in Ghana’s Universal Health Coverage infrastructure by David Bannister
Promotional materials from the global campaign to achieve Universal Health Coverage by the year 2030. Copyright UHC2030 – reproduced here under ‘fair use’ for academic purposes. “Health for…
Seeing like a state of exception | 例外状态的视角
In a bittersweet combination of personal achievement and global emergency, I moved to Norway and started working on a new research project right when the COVID-19 epidemic started…
Seminar: Digital Technologies as Material Culture 2020
In this MA seminar at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna, we explore digital media technologies from an anthropological/ethnographic perspective in the context o…
The Knot of Ecological Time: An Outlet, an Election, and an Irrigation Office
By Maira Hayat, Stanford University § In 2015, local elections were held in Pakistan, ten years after the previous ones in 2005 during General Pervez Musharraf’s military rule.…
Archiving for the Anthropocene: Notes from the Field Campus
On a chilly Sunday afternoon in March, our Field Campus group walked through downtown Granite City, Illinois. Located just 6 miles north of St. Louis, the downtown was…
Optics and Fluidity: Evading Surveillance in Hong Kong
請點此閱讀中文版 Eyes in/on/for Hong Kong At the Hong Kong airport, thousands of protesters line the arrivals hall. Creating a corridor for passengers to walk through, they stand silently,…
Driver-Citizens and Technical Safety in India: Traffic Violations and Penalties in the Motor Vehicle Act 2019
One of the first things that gets discussed with reference to India is road traffic. Erstwhile known as a land of snake charmers, this classically orientalist image of…
“India’s Gig-work Economy” Roundtable
This roundtable discussion marks the end of our series on India’s Gig-work Economy. In this discussion, we reflect on methods, challenges, inter-subjectivities and possible future directions for…
Negotiating Ethical Technology Use: Trust and Care in End-of-Life Conversations
The video-screen carrying robot used by doctors to converse with patients. The headline on the local news station’s website was sensational: “Bereaved Family Upset Kaiser Used Robot…
New Zine on the History of Sanitation
Our zine “Infrastructural Digest” is now completed(!) and 250 copies have just been printed for the opening of the Privy2 demonstration garden. The zine features original artwork and…