17 DECEMBER 2021
Disappearing Donkey. On the unexpected effects of the ‘New Silk Road’ infrastructure projects in Asia
Invited talk, online
Emilia Sułek
In an invited talk called “Disappearing Donkey. On the unexpected effects of the ‘New Silk Road’ infrastructure projects in Asia” Emilia presents the results of her latest research in Kyrgyzstan. What role does the donkey hide play in this, and what does all this say about the nature of Chinese economic endeavors in Central Asia?
The event was organized by ZAND: Zespół Antropologii Niezdyscyplinowanej, Polish Academy of Sciences, a young and innovative academic body that aims to create a space for interdisciplinary discussion between anthropology and other disciplines, including the sciences.
17 DECEMBER 2021
“Infrastructure and Life” – Interdisciplinary Reading Group
Season 006 Episode 002
16 NOVEMBER 2021
Welcome and Unwelcome Connections: Travelling Post-Soviet Roads in Kyrgyzstan – Talk in the Social Sciences Department’s Colloquium, University of Fribourg
Drawing on ten months of fieldwork in central Kyrgyzstan, Zarina demonstrates in this talk how old and new roads become sites where regional identities can either be confirmed or contested. Further, she elaborates on how the inhabitants of the district of Toghuz-Toro take care of their own mobility and desired connections in a harsh terrain, in the absence of state-managed public transport, and in a situation that sees only rudimentary road maintenance. Last, Zarina discusses how technologies such as mobile Internet, and social media like Facebook, have engendered a profound transformation in the use of transport infrastructure, breathing new life into journeys along the old, dilapidated post-Soviet roads.
10-12 NOVEMBER 2021
Conference “Eurasia in Transition: Geopolitics, Connections and Challenges”
University of Zurich
Agnieszka’s paper “A Road, a Disappearing River and Fragile Connectivity in Sino-Inner Asian Borderlands” and Zarina’s paper “Connecting North and South: A Historical Overview of Road Infrastructure in Kyrgyzstan” are part of the panel “Infrastructure and Trade” chaired by Jeronim Perović.
20-23 OCTOBER 2021
Hotel Weiss Kreuz, Splügen, Switzerland
This workshop was co-hosted by three research projects: the China Made project based at the University of Colorado Boulder, Environing Infrastructure based at the Rachel Carson Center, LMU Munich, and the ROADWORK project.
The aim of the workshop was to outline two factsheets. One of the factsheets focuses specifically on the BRI, its geo-political implications and discuss the power of its name, the discourse around it, and the work that this brand does globally. The second factsheet focuses more generally on China’s infrastructural activities in Asia in a longer-term perspective. Its aim is to discuss the effects of these activities on the legal, environmental, labour and sovereignty regimes, as well as on the local-scale environmental, cultural, socio-economic, and labour practices throughout Asia.
We plan is to publish these factsheets as widely as possible in various online collections, blogs, magazines, and websites. Further, they will be distributed to policy makers, NGOs and national development agencies.
It was wonderful to spend these three days together working, hiking and enjoying each other’s company after nearly two years of no face-to-face interactions!
6 OCTOBER 2021
The annual conference of the “Society for Social Studies Science” (4S) is with more than 3200 registrants one of the largest of its kind. In 2021 the event took place virtually in Toronto and worldwide. It was themed “Good Relations: Practices and Methods in Unequal and Uncertain Worlds.” Verena contributed to the panel “Coastalization: Thinking global relations from the coast” with a presentation titled “Congested coasts and hospitable hinterlands: Dry ports in Germany and Kazakhstan.” In her talk she addressed inland transportation routes as attractive alternatives for congested sea ports during the Covid-19 pandemic. As hinterland extensions of coastal infrastructures they are meeting places of people, goods, technologies and forms of governmentality, which interact there in new and often unexpected ways. She analysed the Khorgos dry port on the Sino-Kazakh border and Nuremberg intermodal container terminal as centres of social and economic gravity which produce a multiplicity of human and non-human relationships.
29 SEPTEMBER 2021
Conference Paper “An empty road: Visual impressions and temporal aspects of implementing the BRI in south-eastern Kazakhstan,” Conference ‘Emptiness: Ways of Seeing’
University of Oxford, online
The conference “Emptiness: Ways of Seeing” was part of the ERC funded research project “Emptiness”, based at the University of Oxford and took place virtually from 29. September until 1. October 2021. Verena contributed with a talk titled “An empty road: Visual impressions and temporal aspects of implementing the BRI in south-eastern Kazakhstan.”
Drawing on 16 months of ethnographic field research, she addressed emptiness on a central road of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Kazakhstan through the lens of the anthropology of infrastructure. She drew on the concept of suspension (Akhil Gupta) in order to analyze the time between the construction/start of a project and its completion and to better comprehend the temporality of what is experienced or framed as emptiness. She argued that in the context of the BRI, a relational understanding of emptiness needs to be employed. This can help us compare the plans and promises of governments and other institutional bodies involved in the project constructions as well as media coverage and the ways how infrastructure is used and made sense of on the ground.
24 SEPTEMBER 2021
RDWK Team Colloquium VI: Talk “Grounding global China in northern Laos: The making of the infrastructure frontier,” Jessica Di Carlo, University of British Columbia
24 SEPTEMBER 2021
Season 006 Episode 001
20 SEPTEMBER 2021
In the fall semester 2021 the ROADWORK team teaches collectively two seminars. Our aim is to share our research findings as well as the knowledge on research methods and ethics with the BA and MA students of Social Sciences at the University of Fribourg.
Emilia and Verena give a combined BA/MA Seminar “Schwarzgeld & Schattenwirtschaft: Anthropologischer Blick ins ökonomische Grenzland des Staates,” and Agnieszka and Zarina give an MA Seminar “Methods and ethics of anthropological research.”
14 SEPTEMBER 2021
BRI: Concrete effects of an elusive strategy
Brown Bag Lunch, Swiss Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Eurasia Division
Agnieszka and Zarina were invited to give the annual lecture at the Eurasia Division of the Swiss Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This annual event, which brings together Swiss diplomats and academics working on and in Eurasia was a great opportunity for the ROADWORK team to share our research findings and to discuss Switzerland’s engagement in Central Asia.
We’d like to thank the team of Ambassador Anna Ifkovits Horner for their hospitality and the participants for stimulating questions!
13 SEPTEMBER 2021
Die neue Seidenstrasse – Auswirkungen der neuen Infrastrukturprojekte im chinesischen Zentralasien
Public lecture at Kafi Blickfabrik, Zurich
Agnieszka was invited by the Ethnological Association of Zurich to give a talk in the public lecture series “Kafi Blickfabrik.”
In her talk, Agnieszka discussed how the lives of people living along the newly asphalted roads change when local roads become part of transnational transportation routes and pointed to the many exclusions that new infrastructures generate, despite their promise of universal connectivity.
26 AUGUST 2021
RDWK team colloquium V: Talk “Geopolitics of Infrastructure in a Frontier Space,” Hassan H. Karrar, Lahore University of Management Sciences
ROADWORK team
In his talk he argued that infrastructure plays an agential role in securitization of everyday life in the Karakoram high mountains of north Pakistan. Long cycles of military rule, juxtaposed against a territorial dispute with India, and alignment with Chinese interests—Pakistan borders both countries in the Karakoram—has resulted in the military becoming custodians of state modernization through technocratic expertise, and recently, protectors of capital circulating under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) investment regime.
16 JULY 2021
Season 005 Episode 005
24 JUNE 2021
This time we had the pleasure to listen to the amazing Galen Murton. In his presentation “The Power of Blank Spaces in Building a New Nepal,” Galen explored the concept of ‘useful fuzziness’ (Narins and Agnew 2019) as a starting point of a critical cartography of the BRI. He asked why the BRI development throughout the Tibet-Himalaya region remains conspicuously blank on most maps, and what work (Wood 2010) is accomplished by such cartographic silences (Harley 2001).
In contrast to this, the BRI is very much present in Nepal – discursively, materially, and cartographically. Chinese development programs are widely anticipated, embraced, and promoted as grand and spectacular things throughout Nepal, and BRI imaginaries operate across a range of socio-spatial landscapes. Following this friction of representation, Galen showed the manifold ways in which infrastructures articulate politics and, vice-versa, how politics articulate infrastructures.
15 JUNE 2021, 9am-12pm
Agnieszka represented the ROADWORK project in the kick-off meeting organized by Tobias Haller and Samuel Weissman from the Institute of Social Anthropology (University of Bern) to discuss the contents of a planned factsheet on social, health-related, economic, and geopolitical outcomes of mega-infrastructure projects globally.
The factsheet for the Swiss Academy of Sciences’ Commission for Research Partnerships with Developing Countries (KFPE) will be based on the first-hand knowledge on mega projects gathered at four Swiss research institutions: the Centre for Development and Environment (CDE) in Bern, the Social Anthropology Unit (Université de Fribourg) represented by the ROADWORK project, the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (TPH) in Basel, and the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Bern, which will take the lead in composing the factsheet.
4 JUNE 2021
Season 005 Episode 004
1 JUNE 2021
All the way from Kazakhstan to Germany: Field research during the COVID-19 pandemic
27 MAY 2021
19 MAY 2021
In this second lecture for regional Rotary Clubs in Switzerland Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi continues her discussion of China’s Belt and Road Initiative and the repercussions that the Initiative has in China’s border regions and in Central Asia.
7 MAY 2021
“Infrastructure and Life” – Interdisciplinary Reading Group
Season 005 Episode 003
24 APRIL 2021
The first round of mentoring in team, Kriens
The core team of the ROADWORK project met on this beautiful Saturday at Emilia’s home in Kriens for a relaxed day of mentoring in team. The aim of this meet-up was to review our CVs and publication lists, locate the so called ‘gaps’, present our plans for the future, and draft strategies for implementing these plans. As the competition on the academic job market is huge, this mentoring session was meant as the time in which we can pause, discuss our “dream jobs,” and think of ways in which we can strengthen our profiles to apply for positions in both academia and outside of it, for example in science communication, international organizations or in the development sector.
15 APRIL 2021
The second talk of our RDWK online team meeting was given by the new member of our research group – Björn Reichhardt.
His talk was titled “Uncertainty, Security and Spatial Production: An Ethnography of Borders and Liminality in Rural Mongolia”.
In his insightful presentation Björn drew on dissertational research in rural Mongolia where he investigates how border making practices have an impact on the perception of environments and security in the context of post-socialist uncertainty. By drawing on the example of Khatgal, a touristic village in northern Mongolia that has undergone various infrastructural changes during the past decades, the presentation pointed to both the historical and material conditions from which particular borders have emerged as well as the socio-spatial agency exercised by borders, roads, and the liminal spaces they create.
9 APRIL 2021
“Infrastructure and Life” – Interdisciplinary Reading Group
Season 005 Episode 002
Our inter-disciplinary Infrastructure Reading Group is growing: Welcome to all new members!
Did you ever think about infrastructure above the clouds or the relation between termites and infrastructure? In this session we had the pleasure to read Tina Harris´ engaging text about aviation in Nepal “Air Pressure: Temporal Hierarchies in
Nepali Aviation” Cultural Anthropology 36.1 (2021): 83–109, and Maan Barua`s text “Infrastructure and non-human life: A wider ontology” Progress in Human Geography 20 (10) (2021): 1–23.
31 MARCH 2021, 7-9 pm
Since 2013, when the Open Up the West program made way for the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), many dirt roads in western China have received new tarmac covers, and plenty of new expressways and airports have been built. The infrastructure to potentially go anywhere is in place, but for many actual journeys remain no less stuttering and confusing than they were in the 1990s. This talk will reflect on how the bureaucratic terrain of western China continues to affect the ways in which human beings can travel, and more generally “be,” in this region of Asia. It will also discuss the opacity of the promise that the new infrastructures give, and finally ponder the question of how anthropological knowledge can contribute to understanding infrastructural mega-initiatives like the BRI.
25 MARCH 2021
RDWK team colloquium I
ROADWORK team
The ROADWORK team members are based in different continents reaching from the US over Europe and Asia to Australia. It has been more than a year since the pandemic prevented us from gathering in person. Thus, in March 2021 we launched the RDWK online team colloquium.
Eric Schlüssel was our first speaker. His kick-off talk had the title “Exploring the Capillaries of Commerce in Turn-of-the-Century Xinjiang.” This is a brief summary of Eric’s fascinating talk: Historians and social scientists alike often characterize the vast Uyghur homeland as a site of extraction by great states, or as an entrepot between them. However, when we turn our eyes to the capillaries of commerce, the ways in which ordinary farmers, merchants, and others within the region moved and marketed goods, we can identify circuits of economic activity that were intimately tied to large landholding institutions such as pious endowments. This presentation explores a case study of how transregional merchants collaborated with the state to remake the region’s roadways at the turn of the twentieth century, resulting in major changes in ecology and infrastructure
5 MARCH 2021
“Infrastructure and Life” – Interdisciplinary Reading Group
Season 005 Episode 001
This infrastructure reading group`s session takes us into enlightened spaces of North America and Western Europe and then to Egypt`s complex irrigation infrastructure.
We read “The gloomy city: Rethinking the relationship between light and dark” Urban Studies Journal Limited52.3 (2015): 422-438 by Tim Edensor, and “States of maintenance: Power, politics, and Egypt’s irrigation infrastructure” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 35.1 (2017): 146–164 by Jessica Barnes.
22 FEBRUARY 2021, 1-1.45 pm
2013 hat Chinas Präsident Xi Jinping die sogenannte „Neue Seidenstrasse“-Initiative lanciert. Die Initiative sieht den Bau immenser Infrastrukturnetzwerke vor, mit dem Ziel, den euroasiatischen Kontinent in einen dicht vernetzten Raum zu verwandeln.
Prof. Joniak-Lüthi untersucht die soziale Komplexität der neugebauten Infrastruktur. Ihr Fokus liegt auf den Strassen, die Nordwest China mit Zentralasien und dann weiter mit Europa langfristig verbinden sollen. In diesem Vortrag beleuchtet Prof. Joniak-Lüthi verschiedene Aspekte ihrer Forschung und diskutiert die langfristigen sozialen, wirtschaftlichen, politischen und ökologischen Folgen der neuen Strassen und Bahnlinien.
5 FEBRUARY 2021
Workshop: “The Social and Cultural Meaning of Money in Central Asia”
Verena La Mela
Gulzat Botoeva and Oybek Madiyev from the London Central Asia Research Network (https://www.centralasianresearch.org/) organized an online workshop to consider the social aspects of money. Various scholars presented their research and explored the social meanings of money at different sites across Central Asia, including Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, and Xinjiang. One of the panels focused on gendered aspects of money and another on its moral narratives and interpretations. The findings of the workshop will be published in a special issue.
Verena contributed a presentation about how money creates social relationships among Uyghur women in the Sino–Kazakh borderlands. Booming infrastructure development around Khorgos, one of the main BRI hubs, and the business opportunities this has created, have enabled local women to earn substantial amounts of cash. Many women use these funds to invest in the social gathering called chai, tea, through which they establish further sustainable social and economic relationships.
27 JANUARY 2021, 2-4 pm
“Infrastructure and Life” – Interdisciplinary Reading Group
Season 004 Episode 004
We start our first reading group meeting in 2021 with the following two texts:
Magnus Marsden and Madeleine Reeves “Marginal Hubs: On conviviality beyond the urban in Asia: Introduction”, Modern Asian Studies 53, 3 (2019) pp. 755–775, and Jonathan Silver “DISRUPTED INFRASTRUCTURES: An Urban Political Ecology of Interrupted Electricity in Accra”, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, (2016): 984-1003.
We warmly welcome you to join the reading group. Please contact agnieszka.joniak-luethi@uzh.ch
