This essay describes an emerging “post‐grid imaginary” that is informing visions of future collapse, growing scarcity, and deepening infrastructural fragmentation. By examining electrical grid ...failures in Lebanon and California, we can move beyond developmentalist assumptions about the supposedly different trajectories of the so‐called Global North and South. The post‐grid imaginary is at the center of a present and future struggle that is continuous with a global process that looks a lot like structural adjustment in the “Global South” and rampant privatization and austerity in the “Global North.” As states turn away from promises of endless expansion and universal access, the post‐grid imaginary is one way in which states, private utilities, and individuals respond to the urgent need to transform the existing energy system. While a post‐grid imaginary is not inevitable, it is an increasingly visible approach that can lead to geographical disconnection, uneven access, and infrastructural abandonment.
What causes violent conflicts around the Middle East? All too often, the answer is sectarianism-popularly viewed as a timeless and intractable force that leads religious groups to conflict. ...InEveryday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon, Joanne Nucho shows how wrong this perspective can be. Through in-depth research with local governments, NGOs, and political parties in Beirut, she demonstrates how sectarianism is actually recalibrated on a daily basis through the provision of essential services and infrastructures, such as electricity, medical care, credit, and the planning of bridges and roads.
Taking readers to a working-class, predominantly Armenian suburb in northeast Beirut called Bourj Hammoud, Nucho conducts extensive interviews and observations in medical clinics, social service centers, shops, banking coops, and municipal offices. She explores how group and individual access to services depends on making claims to membership in the dominant sectarian community, and she examines how sectarianism is not just tied to ethnoreligious identity, but also class, gender, and geography. Life in Bourj Hammoud makes visible a broader pattern in which the relationships that develop while procuring basic needs become a way for people to see themselves as part of the greater public.
Illustrating how sectarianism in Lebanon is not simply about religious identity, as is commonly thought,Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanonoffers a new look at how everyday social exchanges define and redefine communities and conflicts.
In 2015, protestors south of Beirut, Lebanon, blocked the road to the landfill in Naimeh, an improperly prepared and overflowing dumpsite that serves as a collection point for Beirut's garbage. As ...piles of garbage grew on Beirut's streets, so did a massive protest that was not defined or organized by either of the major political factions or any of the sectarian political parties in Lebanon. Why were the 2015 protests not organized along the dominant sectarian political lines? This article analyzes the protests and their aftermath to understand how a relation to shared infrastructures plays a role in the emergent forms of citizenship brought about in the protest movement.
Thinking Infrastructures Martin Kornberger, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Julia Elyachar, Andrea Mennicken, Peter Miller, Joanne Randa Nucho, Neil Pollock / Martin Kornberger, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Julia Elyachar, Andrea Mennicken, Peter Miller, Joanne Randa Nucho, Neil Pollock
Research in the sociology of organizations,
2019, 2019-08-08, Letnik:
62
eBook, Book
Odprti dostop
This volume introduces the notion of Thinking Infrastructures to explore a broad range of phenomena that structure attention, shape decision-making, and guide cognition: Thinking Infrastructures ...configure entities (via tracing, tagging), organise knowledge (via search engines), sort things out (via rankings and ratings), govern markets (via calculative practices, including algorithms), and configure preferences (via valuations such as recommender systems). Thus, Thinking Infrastructures, we collectively claim in this volume, inform and shape distributed and embodied cognition, including collective reasoning, structuring of attention and orchestration of decision- making.
Abstract
This essay describes an emerging “post-grid imaginary” that is informing visions of future collapse, growing scarcity, and deepening infrastructural fragmentation. By examining electrical ...grid failures in Lebanon and California, we can move beyond developmentalist assumptions about the supposedly different trajectories of the so-called Global North and South. The post-grid imaginary is at the center of a present and future struggle that is continuous with a global process that looks a lot like structural adjustment in the “Global South” and rampant privatization and austerity in the “Global North.” As states turn away from promises of endless expansion and universal access, the post-grid imaginary is one way in which states, private utilities, and individuals respond to the urgent need to transform the existing energy system. While a post-grid imaginary is not inevitable, it is an increasingly visible approach that can lead to geographical disconnection, uneven access, and infrastructural abandonment.
Scholars and practitioners in the subfields of Environmental and Medical Anthropology have adopted photo-based collaborative research methodologies like photovoice as a means of incorporating ...participants in community-based research in a hybrid practice that borrows from the collective filmmaking strategies of visual anthropologists like Jean Rouch, the pedagogy of the oppressed of Paolo Freire (2000), and the feminist critiques of the 1990s and 2000s (Harper 2012; Pink 2007; Rouch and Feld 2003). In this article, we demonstrate how a collaborative research methodology using digital photography and group discussions was applied within a parent engagement program at a primary school in Los Angeles. The methods and findings show how photography revealed points of convergence and divergence between two groups of participants: (1) parents and caretakers and (2) teachers and school support staff. We demonstrate how the photovoice-inspired methods helped the two stakeholder groups in a school community identify and address shared problems through creative practice, discussion, and action. The article closes with a discussion of how researchers and community participants can work together to ensure the sustainability of the initiatives fostered through this methodological approach.
Introduction to Thinking Infrastructures Bowker, Geoffrey C; Elyachar, Julia; Kornberger, Martin ...
Research in the sociology of organizations,
2019, Letnik:
62
Book Chapter, Journal Article
Becoming Armenian in Lebanon Nucho, Joanne Randa
Middle East report (New York, N.Y. 1988),
07/2013, Letnik:
43, Številka:
267
Journal Article
Each year in April, the municipality of Burj Hammoud, a densely populated residential and commercial city just east of Beirut, hosts a three-day festival called Badguer, the Armenian word for ...`image.' Free and open to the public, the event has variously been staged in an old concrete factory, a blocked-off street and other sites. In 2012, Badguer was held at La Maison Rose, a newly opened cultural center for Armenian artists and craftsmen. Like the annual celebration, La Maison Rose is part of a local effort to promote `our living Armenian cultural patrimony.' Badguer featured Armenian folk musical performances and exhibitions of local arts and crafts, such as photography, metal arts and paintings. One day was devoted entirely to presentations of university projects completed by Armenian architecture students about problems in the Burj Hammoud area, such as pollution in the Beirut river or the housing crisis in Camp Sanjak, an informal residential district (originally a refugee camp for Armenians displaced from Iskenderun in 1939) that the Burj Hammoud city government intends to redevelop. Promotional flyers sold these presentations as addressing `our ancestry caught between the culture of origin and the challenges of the new country.' By framing development initiatives as part of a project of historic and cultural preservation and by presenting Lebanon as the `new country,' even though most everyone involved is at least second- or third-generation Lebanese-born, Badguer makes explicit what many Lebanese already believe about Burj Hammoud-that it is Beirut's Armenian quarter.
