Infrastructures of Democracy

Recent Paper Presentation: Roads, Responsibilities and the Public Good

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In October 2019 Elsie Lewison presented a paper co-authored by Tulasi Sigdel, Katharine Rankin and Lagan Rai at the 48th Annual Conference on South Asia. University of Wisconsin, Madison.

The paper was presented in a session titled The Administration of Everyday Life, organized by Andrew Haxby, which included the following papers:

Elsie Lewison (University of Toronto), Tulasi Sigdel, Katharine Rankin & Lagan Rai, Roads, Responsibilities and the Public Good: Negotiating the bureaucratic space of road users’ committees

Andrew Haxby (University of Michigan), Legibility as a Dimension of Class: Income and Private Finance in Kathmandu

Sara Shneiderman (University of British Columbia), Equivocating households: kinship, materiality, and the bureaucracy of everyday life in post- earthquake Nepal

Heather Hindman (University of Texas-Austin), Language Classes for Fishing: Everyday Bureaucracy of the EPS (Employment Permit System) in Nepal

You can find the abstract of this paper, along with other project related materials on our Presentations page

AAG 2019 Asia Symposium: Nepal and Himalayan Geographies

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In April 2019 IOD team members and collaborators organized a symposium at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers in Washington DC.

Description: Geographers of Nepal and the Himalaya have been convening informally at AAG over the past two years to discuss common points of interest across different geographic subfields (physical geography, human geography, human-environment, GIS). The related themes of sustainability, disaster and infrastructure have emerged as both shared research interests for geographers of Nepal and the Himalaya, as well as key questions of global concern that can benefit from Himalayan perspectives.

The Nepal and Himalayan Geographies group invited proposals for short papers that stake out research directions and critical questions in Nepal and Himalayan geography at the interface of sustainability, disaster and infrastructure. The papers aim to clarify how critical conversations on Himalayan worlds can furnish insights on these key themes that will be of interest to wider communities of geographic scholarship.

Find a PDF of the all of the paper abstracts here: Nepal and Himalayan Geographies

Conference Report: Seventh Annual Kathmandu Conference on Nepal and the Himalaya

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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

Workshop Report: 2nd Roadology Workshop Report

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The 2nd Roadology Workshop was convened November 8-10 by Professor Yongming Zhou (University of Wisconsin Madison) at Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) in Shenzhen China. Building on the 1st Roadology Workshop (University of Chongqing, December 2014), the three-day meeting at SUSTech brought together active members of multiple research groups studying the social politics of road development across the Asia region. The Infrastructures of Democracy team was represented by Tulasi Sigdel, Lagan Rai, and Shyam Kunwar. In addition to IoD, multiple members of other roads studies research groups were also present at the workshop. This includes: four members of Ed Simpson’s SOAS-based ERC: Roads research group (Luke Heslop, Srinivas Chokkakula, Debbie Menezes, Mustafa Khan); one member of James Sidaway’s NUS-based Borders, Mobilities, and Infrastructures group (Jasnea Sarma); members of Yongming Zhou’s SUSTech and University of Wisconsin-Madison-based Roadology group (Yi Huang); and an affiliate member of Martin Saxer’s LMU-based ERC starting grant Remoteness and Connectivity: Highland Asia and the World group (Galen Murton).

The workshop comprised over thirty papers delivered across two parallel sessions, convened in both English and Chinese. The IoD team presented three papers across two panel sessions: Building Roads, Bridging Borders: Infrastructural Development, Transport Connectivity, and the Social Lives of Roads and Local Impacts of Rural Road Development in the Trans-Himalaya. Tulasi presented “Political Economies and Political Rationalities of Road Building in Nepal: Notes from the Archives,” Lagan presented “Rural Roads Matter: Debate and Practice of Road Building in the Eastern Plains of Nepal,” and Shyam presented “The Politics of Road Development: A Comparative Study of Charikot‐Singati‐Lamabager Road in Central Nepal and Bhalubang‐Pyuthan Road in Western Nepal.” In the spirit of an academic workshop, the setting fostered productive conversations and strategic, collaborative planning in addition to many excellent paper presentations.

The workshop also yielded several distinct outcomes, including both publication projects and future collaborative opportunities. As a direct result of conversations held during the Roadology Workshop, participants recognized the potential for and began formulating plans for the organization of an international ‘Roadology Consortium’ to be hosted with administrative support from SUSTech (website coming soon). Additionally, Professor Yongming Zhou has also organized an edited volume of workshop proceedings to be published by SUSTech Press in 2018. Furthermore, Luke Heslop and Galen Murton have initiated an additional edited volume project that will include new papers and projects that were not delivered at the workshop. In addition to these forthcoming publications, many of the participants also look forward to upcoming meetings at SOAS (July 2018), the Annual Conference on South Asia at the University of Wisconsin Madison (October 2018), and the workshop on Infrastructure in Asia at the University of Colorado Boulder (October 2018).

The energy and outcomes of the Roadology Workshop demonstrate the strength of and enthusiasm behind road studies projects in North America, Europe, and Asia today. It is exciting to anticipate what’s next for many of us involved. Please stay tuned…!

Galen Murton

Geographic Science Program
James Madison University
Harrisonburg, Virginia USA