Infrastructures of Democracy
Kunwar, Shyam Bahadur & Shanta Thapa. (2076/2019). The Complexity of Grassroots Development Practice in Dolakha. Paper Presented at the Chautari Annual Conference – 2019. Martin Chautari, Thapathali, Kathmandu, Baishakh 8-10, 2076 (April 21-23, 2019).
Link to a pdf of the full conference schedule
Pigg, S. and Kunwar, S. (2019). “Experiments with Visual Story-telling: A Graphic Novel on Road Politics”. Presentation for the Additional Research Seminar, Martin Chautari, Kathmandu, February 11, 2019.
Special themed issue on Nepal Geographies: sustainability, disasters, infrastructure
Studies in Nepali History and Society
Special Issue editors: Katharine Rankin, Elsie Lewison, Dinesh Paudel, Galen Murton
The themed issue will be comprised of 2-3 commissioned short review essays and several additional contributions on the themes of sustainability, disasters and infrastructure, for which we are soliciting proposals.
The contributions may take the form of:
Please prepare a 1-paragraph proposal stating:
Deadlines/Timeline:
बिकासमा बददैछा दुरुपयोग “Increasing Misuse in Development” by Samjhana Nepali was recently published in Rara Sandesh a local newspaper in Mugu, Nepal.
This article speaks to how roads and politics have intersected in Mugu district in the past year. Roads served as a tool for political elites and leaders to raise hopes and dreams for development in Mugu in order to win seats in the recent elections. However, after being elected the leaders are failing to fulfill their promises and instead are misusing the resources allocated for the road development.
Find a full version of the article here: बिकासमा बददैछा दुरुपयोग
Visit our publications page for access to this and other publications
Seventh Annual Kathmandu Conference on Nepal and the Himalaya
July 25-27, 2018
Hotel Shanker, Lazimpat, Kathmandu
The IOD team convened a paper session at the Seventh Annual Kathmandu Conference on Nepal and the Himalaya. The panel included three papers authored by: Lagan Rai; Shyam Kunwar; Katharine Rankin, Pushpa Hamal, Tulasi Sigdel and myself as well as thoughtful and incisive discussion from Sara Shneiderman and Dinesh Paudel.
Panel title: Ethnographies of Infrastructure: Roads, State Building and Everyday Practice in Nepal’s Agrarian Districts
This panel brings together papers presenting different facets of preliminary research findings from a five-year research project entitled Infrastructures of Democracy: State Building as Everyday Practice in Nepal’s Agrarian Districts. The papers in this panel are intended to share—and solicit critical engagement with—preliminary research findings. This opportunity for feedback in an academic venue will be complemented with a policy oriented analysis workshop also planned for July 2018. Each paper presents a different set of findings and analyses that speak to different dimensions of the larger project’s core questions and reflect the authors’ varied perspectives and positionings. They include ethnographic insights from researchers based in district field sites—highlighting both common themes and context-specific divergences in everyday experiences and articulations of road development—discussions of shifts within governmental rationalities based on the analysis of policy and program documents, as well as reflexive methodological considerations for studies of state-citizen relations.
Panel Chair: Dinesh Paudel, Sustainable Development Department at Appalachian State University
Panel Discussant: Sara Shneiderman, Department of Anthropology, University of British Columbia
Paper 1: Rural Roads Matters: Debate and Practice of Road Building in the Eastern Plains of Nepal
Lagan Rai, Central Department of Sociology/Anthropology, Tribhuvan University
Paper 2: The Politics of the road: Ethnography of Charikot-Singati-Lamabager road of Dolakha, Central Nepal
Shyam Bdr. Kunwar, Central Department of Sociology/Anthropology, Tribhuvan University
Paper 3: Corruption, road building and the politics of social science research in post-conflict Nepal
Katharine Rankin, Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto
Pushpa Hamal, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto
Elsie Lewison, Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto
Tulasi Sharan Sigdel, Director of Studies, Nepal Administrative Staff College
Link to a pdf of the full paper abstracts
Katharine Rankin and I recently participated in a two day workshop in Copenhagen Denmark at Aarhus University entitled Social and political transformation in Nepal: ethnographic perspectives on state- citizen relations. The workshop was organized by Uma Pradhan and Karen Valentin who are both based at the Danish School of Education at Aarhus University. The purpose of the workshop was to collaboratively reflect on different ethnographic perspectives of the state in Nepal, specifically through the lens of the “relational spaces” of state-citizen encounters. Katharine presented a paper entitled Corruption, road building and the politics of social science research in post-conflict Nepal that was co-authored with IOD project members Tulasi Sigdel, Pushpa Hamal and myself. I also presented a paper building on my dissertation work in Jumla, entitled Farmers, Civil Servants and “Inclusive Business” Engineers: Making agricultural markets in Jumla, Nepal. The workshop was a wonderful opportunity to meet and engage with a number of scholars based at Aarhus University currently working in Nepal in a focused and productive space. The papers covered a range of topics from education and mobility, to informal settlements and urban greening. Across these different “faces” of the Nepali state, we were able to identify key convergences and tensions, bringing us to reflections about the geographies of the state and shared questions about where the state begins and ends. We are looking forward to future collaborations and publication plans.
Elsie Lewison
Department of Geography and Planning
University of Toronto
