Theorizing Beyond Modernity: A Modest Approach to Infrastructure and Cities
What can we learn about how people understand the world from a toilet? Changing practices of urban sanitation tell us quite a lot about how people imagine cities, citizens, and nature, and what good relationships entail. This talk starts by tracing a shift towards — then away from — both modern infrastructure and low-tech composting toilets, connecting these to prominent imaginaries of modernity and arcadia/postdevelopment. While metatheory is largely stuck in this binary, sanitation practice has moved beyond this. Drawing on examples from off-grid sanitation in Kampala, Nairobi, Lilongwe and eThekwini, this talk demonstrates that new technologies are underpinned by a different imaginary of the world. There is, thus, a need for new vocabularies to explain both this new form of infrastructure and the imaginary that underpins it. The talk then begins to tease out aspects of an emergent ‘modest imaginary’ in which technology is heterogeneous, progress is possible but non-teleological, the role of the state shifts and nature is seen as something to guide, not submit to nor control. It ends by teasing out what we can learn about a different way of understanding the world by examining new forms of urban sanitation, and what this means for urban sustainability and politics.
Bio
Mary Lawhon is Professor of Political Ecology at the University of Edinburgh. My research examines heterogeneous infrastructure configurations, analysing how such configurations work, are being reworked, and redistribute risk and power. I am interested in the infrastructure as well as what infrastructure tells us about how people understanding the world. Specifically, my research connects changing infrastructural practices to wider debates around the politics of knowledge, what ‘sustainability’ is, and what a good urban future entails. It advances thinking about a ‘modest imaginary’-- a way of understanding the world beyond the modern/arcadian binary-- as an approach to building a better world amid social and ecological uncertainty. Her most recent book (co-authored with Tyler McCreary) is Enough! A Modest Political Ecology for an Uncertain Future.
The lecture will be in English. Everyone is welcome!