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