Citizenship, Infrastructure and the Postcolonial

One-Day Symposium. 
Keynote Speaker: Nikhil Anand.

(A podcast of Nikhil Anand's Keynote Presentation 'Public Matters: On the Making of Water Infrastrcuture in Mumbai'  is available to watch on the Podcasts tab)

Citizenship in the postcolonial world has been the subject of extensive research and theory in the social sciences over the last two decades. Whereas research to date has been dominated by the discursive enunciation of citizenship in relation to nation, community and religion, the most innovative recent work in the field has highlighted the unresolved tension between the language and rhetoric of citizenship and the material and infrastructural resource failures and deficits that both citizens and non-citizens confront. This symposium brings these two concepts together to ask how postcolonial forms of (largely urban) citizenship are shaped by infrastructure or, as is more often the case, the partiality or inadequacy of key infrastructures. Central to the symposium will be the colonial and postcolonial history of the state-led provision of potable water, clean air, housing, transport, education, waste-collection, communications, and educational and health services.