Theme: Interrogating Infrastructure: Why and How Should We Study Road Building in Nepal?

Speaker:  Katharine Rankin

Date: 4 August 2015 (19 Shrawan 2072) Tuesday

Time: 16:00 PM

Venue: Conference Hall, Dikshya Sadan

Infrastructure planning persists as a bastion of now widely discredited modernization theories in development planning —attributed as a technical fix for the challenges of isolation, smallholder subsistence livelihoods, and vulnerability to environmental harms. Road building in particular expresses a powerful modernist aspiration for improvement through enhanced accessibility and mobility. In the mountainous regions of South Asia road building often consumes the majority of local development budgets and it has become a key site for projects of decentralization and local self-governance. This talk presents the research design and approach of a 4-year research project on the convergence of road building and state building, titled Infrastructures of Democracy: State Building as Everyday Practice in Nepal's Agrarian Districts. The talk will share how the research design derives from previous research on local governance in “post-conflict” Nepal, situate the research in relation to a typology of approaches to the study of roads in the literature, and open it up for input at this early stage of the project. 

Katharine N. Rankin is a Professor in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Cultural Politics of Markets: Economic Liberalization and Social Change in Nepal (Pluto Press and University of Toronto Press 2004), and other academic publications related to research interests in the areas of the politics of planning and development, comparative market regulation, feminist and critical theory, neoliberal governance and social polarization. Current research projects investigate commercial gentrification in Toronto and the cultural politics of state restructuring in Nepal.