ILJ Colloquium Fall 2019
Infrastructure, Rights and Regulation
Convened by Benedict Kingsbury and Sally Engle Merry
Speaker: Nikhil Anand, University of Pennsylvania
Topic: Water Infrastructure, Human Rights & Privatization
Location: Furman Hall 120
About Prof. Anand
Nikhil Anand is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the political ecology of cities, read through the different lives of water. His first book, Hydraulic City, focuses on the everyday ways in which cities and citizens are made through the everyday management of water infrastructure in Mumbai. Articles based on this research have also been published in Antipode, Cultural Anthropology, Ethnography and Public Culture. With Hannah Appel and Akhil Gupta, Dr. Anand is also co-editor of a new book, The Promise of Infrastructure that focuses on the ways in which infrastructure provides a generative ground to theorize time and politics.
Dr. Anand’s new research project, The Urban Sea, attends to the ways in which coastal cities are actively constituted through social and natural relationships with the sea. This research decenters the “ground” of urban planning and urban theory by examining how fishers and scientists are negotiating the quotidian uncertainties of the sea to do their work. By attending to these practices, this research proposes to discover other idioms and paradigms with which to inhabit coastal cities in climate changed waters.
Dr. Anand has a BA in Biology from Reed College, a Masters in Environmental Science from Yale University and a PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University.