2022
ARTICLES
Over the past decade, China has seemingly burst onto the global scene as a development actor. In truth, there is a long history of Chinese economic engagement with its neighbours – and beyond. Tracing those various projects shows that there is no single “model” of Chinese development.
The factsheet, initiated by the ROADWORK project team, is a collaborative project of twenty-two scholars with a long-term experience of first-hand research in China and ist neighbouring countries.
The factsheet can be accessed and downloaded here: https://chinadevelopmentmodel.roadworkasia.com
In this factsheet we discuss some of the assumptions that have emerged in the global discourse on the Belt and Road Initiative and provide research-based knowledge that should help us better understand what BRI is, and what it is not.
The factsheet, initiated by the ROADWORK project team, is a collaborative project of twenty-two scholars with a long-term experience of first-hand research in China and its neighbouring countries.
The factsheet can be accessed and downloaded here: https://bri.roadworkasia.com
Hasan H. Karrar, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Lahore, Pakistan
Abstract: Infrastructure has played an agential role in the securitisation of everyday life in the Karakoram high mountains of north Pakistan. Geopolitics bear heavily on this region where Pakistan shares borders with China, with whom it has aligned its foreign and security policy, and with India, with whom Pakistan remains embroiled in a longstanding territorial dispute. Consequently, in the Karakoram, geopolitical anxieties have reflected inwards onto local populations through both security infrastructure and securitised infrastructure. In this postcolony frontier space, statecraft also frequently bypasses normative legal and administrative structures; such exceptions to normative law and administration have antecedents in colonial statecraft on the territorial margins of empire. This paper also argues that long cycles of military rule have allowed the military to acquire and project technocratic expertise, become custodians of state-led development, and recently, to assume guardianship of, and to enter into joint financing with China on, construction projects.
(How hospitable this prostitution is! A feminist critique of anthropo-nonsense)
Guest prostitution is a mythical phenomenon in the texts of anthropologists and travellers from many years ago. Emilia Sułek deconstructs this invention and shows that it has more to do with the positionality of the authors than with the societies they studied.
Published in:
Fragmenty większej całości. Dla Jerzego S. Wasilewskiego. (Agnieszka Kościańska, Magdalena Radkowska-Walkowicz, Tomasz Rakowski eds.). Warszawa, Warsaw University Press, pp. 319-329.
Verena La Mela
Khorgos is one of the main logistical hubs between Asia and Europe. The adjacent ‘International Centre of Boundary Cooperation’ (ICBC Khorgos) is a free-trade zone straddling the Sino-Kazakh border and administered equally by Kazakhstan and China. Its Chinese and Kazakh sides physically melt into each other, and thus it qualifies as an international twin city. The differences between the two sides, however, are striking: compared to the commercially busy Chinese side with its high-rise buildings, the sleepy and flat Kazakh side looks underdeveloped. Its champions promise ‘a huge new city of the future’ and ‘a city of dreams’ with, amongst other things, an international university, a cultural theme park, entertainment and sports complexes. Correspondingly, the greater Khorgos area is imagined and narrated as a future ‘second Dubai’ by politicians, engineers and architects, envisioning a large urban conglomeration with an international airport. As of 2021, neither the airport nor a ‘second Dubai’ has materialized, but construction proceeded little by little. In this chapter, I explore the case of ICBC Khorgos to show how development and interdependence produced a dominant-subordinate twin.
In December 2022 we were finally able to launch the online exhibition “Asphalt – Lines and Lives.” The war in Ukraine has delayed the opening of the exhibition as our Ukrainian design and IT teams suddenly found themselves caught in the middle of an armed conflict. Thanks to their great effort and an impressive persistence of the curators, the exhibition is online, accompanied by a beautiful catalogue. A brief reflection on the relationship between social anthropology and art by Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi opens the catalogue and prepares the ground for the fifteen art projects that comprise the exhibition.
Joniak-Lüthi, Agnieszka. 2022. Social Anthropology and Art. In: Gosia Biczyk, Ulan Djaparov, Philipp Reichmuth, Aida Sulova and Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi (eds). 2022. Asphalt: Lines and Lives. Exhibition Catalogue. Fribourg: University of Fribourg. Pp. 6-11.
The exhibition can be visited here: https://asphalt-lines-lives.com
Over two decades in the making, the China–Kyrgyzstan–Uzbekistan railway has gained new momentum from the war in Ukraine.
EDITORSHIP
How do highways create new hierarchies and reproduce the old ones?
Our colleague/collaborator Galen Murton has co-edited with Luke Heslop a book on road infrastructure development in South Asia and the Tibet-Himalaya region published with Amsterdam University Press. The book “Highways and Hierarchies: Ethnographies of Mobility from the Himalaya to the Indian Ocean” analyses the recent expansion of road construction in South Asia and the Tibet-Himalaya region.
Drawing on rich ethnographic knowledge, works presented in the collection illustrate how new infrastructures simultaneously build new connections and strengthen existing inequalities. The questions raised in the chapters do not only apply to South Asia. Perhaps by reading the book, we can see familiar moments and cases around us wherever we are.
We hope that many of our followers, colleagues, and friends will find this book interesting and enriching to read.
https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789463723046/highways-and-hierarchies
The seventh collection of Roadsides edited by Julie Y. Chu and Tina Harris, with Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi and Tina Harris as managing editors, has been published in April 2022.
Read the issue on the Roadsides website.
The eighth collection of Roadsides edited by Emilia Sulek and Thomas White, with Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi and Tina Harris as managing editors, has been published in November 2022.
Read the issue on the Roadsides website.
MULTIMEDIA
In this beautifully designed catalogue, the curators introduce the artists who participated in the online exhibition with their artistic reflections on the materiality and sociality of travel, asphalt, mobility and immobility in Central Asia.
Biczyk, Gosia, Ulan Djaparov, Philipp Reichmuth, Aida Sulova and Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi (eds). 2022. Asphalt: Lines and Lives. Exhibition Catalogue. Fribourg: University of Fribourg.
Two years after the original call for art contributions the online exhibition “Asphalt – Lines and Lives” is up and running! Sixteen art projects by the artists from the region of Central Asia have been selected for the exhibition from more than fifty project proposals that the curatorial team received in 2020. After a long and arduous journey, which got even longer due to the war in Ukraine, where the exhibition’s IT and design team found themselves caught in the middle of an armed conflict – the exhibition is officially open to visitors.
Many thanks to the curators for bringing together such an amazing group of artists and developing our initial idea into this beautiful and inspiring exhibition. Social anthropologists and artists should definitely collaborate more often!
The exhibition can be visited here: https://asphalt-lines-lives.com
This multimedia story is about anthropological fieldwork. We consider fieldwork the centrepiece of social anthropology. When the COVID 19-pandemic grounded us for more than a year, making it impossible to conduct fieldwork, we decided to dive into our previous fieldwork experiences and draft this story together with our colleagues from Gonzo Design from St. Petersburg.
Joniak-Lüthi, Agnieszka, Verena La Mela, Emilia Róża Sułek, Thomas White, Zarina Urmanbetova, Ksenia Diodorova and Anastasia Voronetskaya. 2022. Fieldwork: Making anthropological knowledge. A multimedia story. Accessible at: https://creatinganthroknowledge.roadworkasia.com
Podcasts have become part of our daily soundscapes. We can listen to different discussions and commentaries on a variety of topics and in a wide range of formats. For us as researchers it is important to communicate our research findings also to non-academic audiences, therefore, we regularly look for and engage in creative forms of communication in addition to typical academic outlets. We were delighted to join Juliet Lu and Eric Myxter-Iino from the Belt and Road Podcast to discuss the ROADWORK project and our research in it.
Our work is based on long-term ethnographic field research on infrastructure and the labor of maintenance, and offers a different perspective on a significant and widely-discussed topic—the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Much research has been conducted on the Initiative and its potential geopolitical implications for countries and regions. In this episode, Agnieszka and Zarina talk about how the BRI materializes on the ground in our field sites in Xinjiang in northwest China, and in Kyrgyzstan. We gathered the knowledge of the BRI by driving on and walking along the roads that have recently been built or are currently under construction; we have lived along them, travelled alongside other people, observed the interactions, and experienced the tensions and disconnectivities, too. We talk about it all in this newest episode of the Belt and Road Podcast. We wish you an enjoyable time listening!
The Belt and Road Podcast, episode 55, February 2022. Listen to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/ch/podcast/the-belt-and-road-podcast/id1419143614?i=1000565996823 or buzzsprout: https://beltandroadpod.buzzsprout.com/196316/10758698-the-politics-of-infrastructure-maintenance-and-decay-w-the-roadwork-asia-project-s-agnieszka-joniak-luthi-and-zarina-urmanbetova
MEDIA
Während Aktivist:innen für ihre humanitäre Arbeit an der belarusischen Grenze angeklagt werden, schmückt sich der Staat mit ihrem Engagement für ukrainische Geflüchtete: Im Osten Polens spiegelt sich derzeit das Unrecht des europäischen Migrationsregimes wider.
Artikel von Emilia Sułek in der WOZ, Nr. 17/22, 28. April 2022 (Bezahlartikel)
Kyrgyzstan’s Tourism Ministry is debating what to do about the Uzbek enclave of Shohimardon. This small piece of land among the mountains in southern Kyrgyzstan is a legacy of Soviet times. It blocks the way to the high mountains and deprives the local population of income from tourism. The border of an enclave closes, then opens, depending on winds of international politics. Emilia Sułek, from the Batken province in southern Kyrgyzstan, writes about the complicated border infrastructure and how it complicates people’s lives.
https://new.org.pl/2250,sulek_szohimardon_enklawa_kirgistan_uzbekistan.html
In this interview Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi and Alessandro Rippa talked with Beril Ocaklı from novastan.org about China’s global role and the myths that have emerged around the Belt and Road Initiative since its launch in 2013. This conversation was a continuation of a larger discussion that we initiated with the publication of two factsheets in the summer of 2022: https://bri.roadworkasia.com/ and https://chinadevelopmentmodel.roadworkasia.com
“China in Central Asia: Fact-checking and myth-busting,” Interview for novastan.org, August 2022. In English: https://novastan.org/en/uyghur-region/china-in-central-asia-fact-checking-and-myth-busting/, in German: https://novastan.org/de/panorama/china-in-zentralasien-factchecking-um-mit-mythen-aufzuraeumen/?noredirect=de-DE
We were excited to talk with Beril Ocaklı from novastan.org about China’s global role and the myths that have emerged around the Belt and Road Initiative since its launch in 2013. This conversation was a continuation of a larger discussion that we initiated with the publication of two factsheets in the summer of 2022:https://bri.roadworkasia.com/ and https://chinadevelopmentmodel.roadworkasia.com
The published interview in English (‘China in Central Asia: Fact-checking and myth-busting’) can be read here: https://novastan.org/en/uyghur-region/china-in-central-asia-fact-checking-and-myth-busting/?noredirect=en-GB
2021
ARTICLES
This article, co-authored by Zarina Urmanbetova and Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi, was published in September 2021 in Central Asian Survey. It is part of the special issue “Technology, Temporality, and the Study of Central Asia” edited by Jonas van der Straeten and Julia Obertreis.
This is the link to the journal’s website: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02634937.2021.1968346
If you’d like to receive a pdf copy of the article, please email Zarina at: zarina.urmanbetova@unifr.ch
Abstract
In this article we discuss how infrastructural connections – here the ‘northbound’ and ‘southbound’ sections of a transregional road crossing the mountainous district of Toghuz-Toro in central Kyrgyzstan – become sites where identities can be either confirmed or contested. Linking this district with places that figure prominently in the symbolic geography of Kyrgyzstan, which divides the country into North and South, the two sections of road are inherently enmeshed in regional identity politics. Further, the article considers how the inhabitants of Toghuz-Toro take care of their own mobility and preserve desired connections in a harsh terrain, in the absence of state-managed public transport, and in a situation that sees only rudimentary road maintenance. It shows that technologies such as mobile Internet, and social media such as Facebook, have engendered a profound transformation in the use of transport infrastructure, breathing new life into journeys along the old, dilapidated post-Soviet roads.
EDITORSHIP
The sixth collection of Roadsides edited by Christina Schwenkel, with Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi as managing editor, has been published in November 2021.
This collection of Roadsides focuses on the sensory dimensions of infrastructure that have yet to be adequately explored and theorized in the literature. The proliferation of scholarship on material infrastructures continues to emphasize the social and the technical over the sensorial, rather than bring these approaches together to study the dense networks that facilitate the provision of goods and resources. This collection seeks to understand the diverse and contingent ways in which we apprehend and make sense of infrastructural worlds through particular modes of sensing.
Read the issue on the Roadsides website.
The fifth collection of Roadsides edited by Alessandro Rippa, with Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi as managing editor, has been published in April 2021.
This issue of Roadsides is concerned with one particular relational aspect of infrastructure that so far has scarcely been explored: the links between infrastructure and archive. The point of departure for this issue is an awareness that the history of the infrastructure that now shapes our lives, as well as of infrastructure that has never been built, lies in particular bodies of texts – documents, images, letters, books, videos and so on. These archives are central to the imagining of infrastructure, to its planning as well to its construction. Yet the relations between concrete infrastructure and such bodies of text are seldom addressed.
In this issue archives are understood in the broadest sense as any collection of documents, stories, reports, notices, banners and placards, photographs, video recordings, sounds, posted bills or rumours – i.e. anything textual (in the term’s widest conception) that represents a writing and a reading of the social worlds created and mediated by infrastructure.
Read the issue on the Roadsides website.
MEDIA
Manche Teile von Kirgistans Aussengrenzen wurden nach Zerfall der Sowjetunion nie definitiv gezogen, im Frühling kam es erneut zu kriegerischen Auseinandersetzungen. Zentraler Streitpunkt ist das Wasser, das in der Region immer knapper wird.
Artikel von Emilia Sułek in der WOZ, Nr. 44/21, 4. November 2021
The September 2021 issue of the student journal Spectrum published bi-monthly at the University of Fribourg features an article “Chinas Belt and Road Initiative – ein ‘siebenköpfiger Drache’” based on an interview with Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi. Agnieszka discusses in it the elusiveness of the BRI and explains how the ROADWORK research team tries to grasp its workings through ethnographic fieldwork focusing on selected BRI projects.
Many thanks to Corina Dürr from the journal for this enjoyable collaboration.
Link to the September issue: https://www.yumpu.com/fr/document/view/65872196/spectrum-04-2021
2020
ARTICLES
Labour of Love: An Open Access Manifesto for Freedom, Integrity, and Creativity in the Humanities and Interpretive Social Sciences.
Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi and twelve other OA editors and advocates have co-authored “Labour of Love: An Open Access Manifesto for Freedom, Integrity, and Creativity in the Humanities and Interpretive Social Sciences”.
The Manifesto has been published here: https://commonplace.knowledgefutures.org/pub/y0xy565k/release/2 and republished in ANUAK: https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/view/4215
It can also be downloaded here: PDF
Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi, together with James Leibold and Matthew Erie published a blog post “Censorship and Sinology in the Era of Chinese Neo-Authoritarianism” in Asian Currents http://asaa.asn.au/censorship-and-sinology-in-the-era-of-chinese-neo-authoritarianism/
Thomas White’s essay “Road Ecology” was published on the Society & Space website, as part of the forum Ecologizing Infrastructure: Infrastructural Ecologies
Max D. Woodworth and Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi co-authored this Introduction to the special issue which was published in February in Eurasian Geography and Economics.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15387216.2020.1727758
Excerpt from the Introduction:
China’s borderlands are an apposite setting to explore how vigorous efforts to drive continental integration are remaking border practices, reconfiguring material spaces at and near borders, and transforming existing social relations and patterns of movement. The BRI signals a significant change, as borderlands are expected to become important interfaces between China and the rest of the Eurasian landmass. Chinese borderlands are now treated as dynamic commercial spaces through which surging flows of manufactured goods and raw materials are expected to pass. A series of newly constructed border zone transshipment sites, like the Khorgos Special Economic Zone at the China–Kazakhstan border, illustrates the urge to refashion borders into spaces of connection and flow, and to rebrand China as an infrastructural powerhouse and commercial hub.
These efforts to stimulate cross-border flows and refashion China’s borderlands have been interpreted in many quarters as a sign of a monolithic “China” arising on the world stage and remaking the landscape of global capitalism. Yet, … such reductionist understandings are not … incomplete for their inability to capture the heterogeneity of the Chinese state and Chinese capital… What is needed are grounded, ethnographic studies that reveal the multiplicities of actors, contexts and a multiplicity of planned and also unplanned effects that are part and parcel of the BRI, just as they were for the earlier state-led development programs in borderlands.
EDITORSHIP
The fourth collection of Roadsides, edited by Madlen Kobi and Nadine Plachta, with Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi as managing editor, has been published in October 2020.
Drawing on emerging conversations between architects, urban planners, geographers, and anthropologists, this issue of Roadsides call for a perspective on contemporary cities that interrogates how architecture and urban design function as and with infrastructure. Architecture and infrastructure come together through social practices and material networks: pipes leading from and to buildings provide water and sewage solutions; the installation of solar and energy storage systems power electricity grids; wires and fiber optic cables enable heating and cooling facilities, sustainable lighting, and high-speed internet; and integrated mobility systems connect houses and recreation areas to underground car parks, vehicle sharing services, metro networks, railways, and other public modes of transportation. In all such cases, repair and maintenance are essential to avoid failure and keep modern forms of living alive. Looking beyond the discrete infrastructural systems that underlie cities, this issue examines the social and political practices that shape urban architecture.
Read the issue on the Roadsides website.
The third collection of Roadsides, edited by Christine Bichsel and with Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi as managing editor, aims to bring into conversation two fields of the social sciences: the emerging social sciences of outer space, and recent social science research on infrastructure. It seeks to explore how insights from the “infrastructural turn” in the social sciences can advance scholarship of outer space, and vice versa.
Existing research in geography, social anthropology and sociology repeatedly stresses the importance of understanding Earth and outer space in relational terms and as mutually constitutive politically, psychologically, philosophically, methodologically and ethically. Hence, this collection seeks to address the following question: How does the conceptual and empirical focus on infrastructure advance our understanding of the cultural, political and economic relationality of outer space?
Read the articles on the Roadsides website.
Special issue edited by Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi and Max Woodworth was published in Eurasian Geography and Economics.
https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rege20/61/1
Abstract:
China’s borderlands have received increased investment and policy attention since Beijing formally launched the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013. This special issue, comprised of four research articles and a photo essay, is designed to provide a timely intervention into the growing literature seeking to situate and assess this important policy campaign.
Drawing on extended ethnographic fieldwork in China’s southwestern, northwestern, and northern borderlands, the contributing authors analyze recent borderland transformations against the backdrop of the BRI. However, by shifting the analytical focus to prioritize voices and events in borderlands, the papers de-center Beijing-centric discourse on the BRI, and provide urgent reminders of region-specific geographies and histories.
Matthäus Rest and Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi co-edited an 8-day long thematic thread #Roadsides in the creative space of the fantastic allegralaboratory.net! Enjoy the published articles, reflections and a very cool multimedia story here: https://allegralaboratory.net/category/thematic-threads/roadsides/
Kudos to the Allegra team for being enthusiastic, supportive and wonderfully uncomplicated!
MEDIA
Schnellstrassen sind nicht nur bequeme Verkehrswege. Mitunter zerschneiden sie Lebensräume, benachteiligen Menschen und wecken falsche Hoffnungen. Ein Team von Sozialanthropologen untersucht Chinas gigantisches Silk-Road-Projekt.
Artikel im UZHmagazin 4/20 mit Text von Michael T. Ganz und Bildern von Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi
On 3 September, Central Asian Analytical Network (CAAN) published, in Russian, Zarina’s interview with project leader Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi on infrastructural projects in Central Asia and how anthropological research could help understand the impacts of new infrastructure projects in the region. CAAN is an integrated platform designed to increase Central Asian citizens’ access to objective information and sophisticated analysis. It provides reportage and discussion in Russian and in the national languages of Central Asia on domestic and global affairs. The Network connects various communities of producers of information and analysis – professional journalists, social activists, bloggers, experts and scholars – the network that has been built up in the region over the last two decades.
2019
ARTICLES
Article by Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi was published Open Access in Political Geography.
Download a pdf copy of the article directly from the journal’s website here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2019.102122, or visit Agnieszka’s academia.edu profile at https://uzh.academia.edu/AgnieszkaJoniakLüthi
The article is a part of the special issue on China’s Belt and Road Initiative edited by G. Oliveira, G. Murton, A. Rippa, T. Harlan and Y. Yang.
Too view all the published articles go to: https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/political-geography/special-issue/10H61ZGZNZD
Abstract:
In 2013, President Xi Jinping formulated China’s vision of Eurasian connectivity: The Silk Road Economic Belt. The strategy envisages the construction of infrastructure networks that will enmesh the Eurasian continent and form an interconnected space of exchange. Since the plan was announced, the Economic Belt has attracted much academic and media attention in terms of the infrastructure being built and its future potentialities. At the same time, questions about the sustainability of this infrastructure in a dynamic Sino–Inner Asian borderland, with its highly fluid terrain and socio-political geography, have been virtually absent from the debate.
The inevitable decay, maintenance and social ambiguity surrounding transport infrastructure lack the appeal associated with new construction projects; yet, discussing them is crucial in the context of mega initiatives such as the Economic Belt. It is important to bring it back ‘down to the ground’ and into more mundane terms. By zooming in on a single desert road in northwest China that has been designated as a crucial conduit in the westward arc of the Economic Belt, this article draws attention to the social complexity and ecological vulnerability of transport infrastructure in the Sino–Inner Asian borderlands.
At one scale, this infrastructure is part of China’s vision of globalization; at another scale, however, it is firmly embedded in local contexts. By pushing the political, ecological and material complexity of road maintenance to the centre of our inquiry, the article offers a new perspective on the current construction boom and its sustainability.
This article by Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi was published in the inaugural issue of Roadsides, an Open Access journal devoted to exploring the social, cultural and political life of infrastructure.
https://doi.org/10.26034/roadsides-20190012.
Excerpt from the introduction:
Infrastructure engages time, and vice versa, in countless ways. Thinking infrastructures as “complicated pleated arrangements,” extensive, even if inconsistent, “fractal” orders (Harvey, Jensen and Morita 2017: 13) and as an aspirationally planetary system, draws attention to temporalities related to the systemic quality of infrastructure. This systemic quality underpins the role that infrastructure has been given in the linear temporalities of the modernization theory, progressivist historiography and various colonial projects (Bowker 2015).
A different perspective, in which a road or a dam is not a module or “eye” in a chain of infrastructural links, but a specific place – a lifeworld – redirects the spotlight to a plethora of other temporalities which are specific to the environment and the social-political terrain in which any road, dam or airport is embedded. In this perspective, each infrastructure is a unique temporal event (Massey 2005: 138-42), that is, the ways in which an infrastructure “is” is contingent on the place and time in which it is embedded.
Published in the edited volume Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough: Ethnographic Responses edited by Francisco Martinez and Patrick Laviolette
Agnieszka’s short chapter on the multiple and conflicting meanings of “maintenance” in northern Xinjiang has just been published in an excellent volume Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough: Ethnographic Responses (New York and Oxford: Berghahn) edited by Francisco Martinez and Patrick Laviolette. To browse the contents of the edited volume go to: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/MartinezRepair
Email Agnieszka (agnieszka.joniak-luethi@uzh.ch) if you’d like a copy of her chapter.
The essay “Orbital” on the global travels of satellite and rocket debris written by Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi has just been published in Society and Space: http://societyandspace.org/2019/04/09/orbital/. It is part of the forum Volumetric Sovereignty edited by Franck Billé. The forum comprises twenty-five contributions divided into five themes: Cartography vs. Volumes, The Subterranean Realm, Turbulence, Bodies and Beyond the Earth. Agnieszka’s essay is part of the Beyond the Earth theme http://societyandspace.org/2019/04/09/volumetric-sovereigntypart-5-beyond-the-earth/
Check out the whole forum here: http://societyandspace.org/2019/04/10/volumetricsovereigntyforum/
EDITORSHIP
Edited by Galen Murton with Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi as managing editor, this second collection of Roadsides employs artistically rendered depictions of labor to show how infrastructures become political and material things through social relations of work. Aesthetically creative and methodologically experimental, the articles utilize photographs, paintings, cartoons, and videos to examine and reveal the impacts and experiences of technological intervention that sometimes escape the frame of textual analysis. Taking up the challenge of labor across a range of scales and places, the collection moves from Nepal and India’s Himalayan borderlands to the Paraguayan Chaco, downtown London to the deserts of Sudan, and urban Sri Lanka to Afghanistan’s Wakhan highlands to illustrate many of the inevitable cracks in the dreams of infrastructural pasts and futures.
Read the articles on the Roadsides website.
Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi is one of the founding editors of the new Open Access journal Roadsides designed to be a forum devoted to exploring the social life of infrastructure. The first beautifully-designed issue titled “Infrastructural Times” was edited by Agnieszka and published in March 2019 on the Roadsides website.
The first collection also contains an introductory article written by Agnieszka titled “Infrastructure as an Asynchronic Timescape”
MEDIA
Zarina Urmanbetova’s podcast channel on social/cultural anthropology, urban and memory studies in Kyrgyzstan and Central Asia. Listen to the last three episodes…
REVIEWS
Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi’s commissioned review essay on three edited volumes published recently in the field of infrastructure studies – The Promise of Infrastructure edited by H. Appel, N. Anand and A. Gupta, Repair Work Ethnographies: Revisiting Breakdown, Relocating Materiality edited by I. Strebel, A. Bovet and P. Sormani, and Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene, edited by K. Hetherington – was published in The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology. https://doi.org/10.3167/cja.2019.370208.
Email Agnieszka (agnieszka.joniak-luethi@uzh.ch) if you’d like a pdf copy of the article.
Joniak-Lüthi, Agnieszka. 2019. Commissioned review of “What is China? Territory, Ethnicity, Culture, and History” (by Ge Zhaoguang 2018). China Review International 24 (1): 21-24.
2018
ARTICLES
Joniak-Lüthi, Agnieszka. 2018. Ethnicity and the Han. In: Tim Wright (ed.). Oxford Bibliographies Online:Chinese Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199920082/obo-9780199920082-0150.xml
Excerpt from the Introduction:
The article focuses on the Han in the People’s Republic of China where they constitute the largest of the fifty-six state-recognized population categories referred in Chinese as minzu. Well into the 1990s, the official English-language translation of the term minzu was “nationality”—a direct reference to the Soviet nationality policy which was one of the major influences in the formulation of the Communist minzu policy. Recently, however, minzu has been increasingly often rendered in official documents as “ethnic group,” arguably in an attempt to do away with the national connotation of the term and to discursively distance China’s minzu model from the Soviet Union which disintegrated along the borders of nationality republics in 1991.
Although Han are popularly referred to as an “ethnic group” not only in the official discourse in China but also in the Western media and in numerous academic publications, ethnicity and minzu classification are not equivalents: Minzucategorization is only a part of much more complex processes of ethnicity in China. With regard to the Han, the identification as Hanzu (i.e., members of the Han minzu) is only one among a number of collective identities between which Han individuals switch in social interactions and which can all be situationally performed as ethnic. Moreover, the Han identity remains in an opaque relationship with such signifiers like Hua or Zhongguoren rendered in English as “Chinese.” Though nominally indicating citizenship shared by all the fifty-six minzu, in practice, even in academic publications, “Chinese” and “Han” are often used as synonyms. Hence, discussion of the contemporary Han must not only include ethnicity and minzu classification, but also other racial and national meanings that this collective identity has been ascribed in 20th-century China.
REVIEWS
Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi’s review of Till Mostowlansky’s book (University of Pittsburg Press, 2017) was published in Europe-Asia Studies.
Joniak-Lüthi, A. 2018. Commissioned review of “Ethnicity in China” (by Xiaowei Zang 2015). Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 24 (2): 648-49.