Civic Matter

Aga Tamiola (Artist - Berlin) Born and raised in Stargard, Poland, Aga Tamioła is a multimedia artist living and working out of Berlin and London. Her geographical and linguistic misplacement led her to focus on an audio-visual reflection on the aspects of loss, identity and belonging in the context of globalisation and new technologies. Aga’s nomadic approach to exploring the mutability of matter manifests itself in sculptural assemblages fusing materials and processes. A very important part of Aga’s practice is collaboration. She looks for spaces to explore her own ideas in dialogue and experiments with others. In 2013, she co-founded the sonic arts collective Random Order. A collective of four artists whose practices expand from sculpture, film and performance into new technologies with immersive environments is currently exploring the notion of noise pollution both from anthropocentric and wildlife perspectives. Their research into noise pollution consists of collecting personal stories – both written and recorded – on what defines noise pollution and how it has affected people’s lives. The other spectrum of noise pollution, they are working on is the threat it constitutes to the welfare of wildlife. Random Order Collective is working on a body of works that offer a glimpse of the animal’s perspective as it comes under auditory assault from the tools and machines of man. From underwater drilling and deforestation to the everyday noises of homo urbanus, we look to experience the animal’s point of view on noise pollution. By sharing their experiences of the world through sound we can gain familiarity with the non-human spectrum of senses in order to bring a clearer understanding of the sonic impact our species has on the world around us.

Dr Felicity Ford (Artist, Oxford Brookes) Abstract With influences as diverse as Rebecca Solnit, Kate Davies, Brandon LaBelle and Pauline Oliveros, Felicity Ford’s KNITSONIK projects connect and extend dialogues within contemporary scholarship of knitting and sounds. Emphasising the sense of place perceptible in both wool and field recordings, Felicity explores how creative knitterly and sonic activities can be incorporated into daily life to positively emphasise connections between the sensing body and its territory: knitting and field recording are framed as cultural practices that can actively inform and shape our sense of place. For the Civic Matters lecture series, Felicity will contextualise and explore recent ventures pertinent to these themes such as the KNITSONIK Stranded Colourwork Sourcebook – a crowd-funded publication on the theme of translating your everyday environment into stranded colourwork and Listening to Shetland Wool – a lecture presentation given at Shetland Wool Week exploring how listening to sounds can help us apprehend textiles in the specific geographical and cultural context of Shetland.

Skateboarding and the City: From Margin to Centre Iain Borden (University College London) Abstract In this talk, I trace the way in which the urban practice skateboarding has moved from a predominantly marginal position in the city – marginal in geographic, cultural and economic terms – to play an increasingly central and/or integrated role in urban cultures and developments. Practised by tens of millions worldwide, skateboarding today makes an important contribution to our current architecture, creative industries, commerce, entrepreneurship and social capital. The talk ranges from California in the 1960s and 1970s to London, Kabul and Indiana in the present day, and from concerns with methodological concerns with history and critical theory to representations in film, music and art.

Dr Marianna Dudley (Bristol) Abstract This paper explores the emergence of conflict between recreational users of British rivers in the twentieth century, and subsequent campaigns for universal public rights of navigation on inland waterways. Citizen-led organizing has, it argues, re-conceptualized river spaces in ways that reflect a modern engagement with, and understanding of, water through recreation. The paper draws on notions of legal geographies, ‘modern’ waters, and hydrocommons to suggest that recreational use - and conflict - is challenging how we use, govern, and conceptualize river water.

Keynote: Mike Pearson (Aberystwyth) 'No joke in petticoats’: interpreting the remains of early Antarctic expeditions

Performing African Laboratories Wenzel Geissler (Oslo) - Tanzania Mariele Neudecker (Bath Spa) - Tanzania Guillaume Lachenal (Paris Diderot) - Cameroon John Manton (Cambridge) - Nigeria

Keynote: Roger Kneebone (Imperial) Backwards through the keyhole: re-enacting the surgical past

Professor Pedro Rebelo (Queen's University, Belfast) Abstract This paper addresses the relationship between local and distributed strategies with reference to two recent participatory sound art projects in Belfast and Rio de Janeiro The local concern for site and place is discussed and juxtaposed with distributed practices, which, by definition question and extend the very notion of site or locale. I refer to examples from ethnomusicology, anthropology and education in which participative horizontal research methodologies lead to a dynamic articulation of local conditions and allow for a reflection on how technology impacts on social interaction and relationships with place. The works of Samuel Araújo, Georgina Born and Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire provide a framework of reference in this context

Listening to Ghosts: Re-Imining the Sound of a Mining Landscape Sarah Buckler (Robert Gordon University) Chair: Noémi Tousignant ( University of Cambridge) Abstract In a mostly forgotten corner of North East England, amid the green fields and small housing estates which cover over the evidence of past industrial fervour, people go about their daily lives haunted by the memories of the past. In the rhythms of their speech and the ongoingness of everyday activity we can trace a moral aesthetic of tension and counterpoint which was once rooted in political and economic relationships and expressed in musical forms and occasions but which is now projected inwards into an inner life and inner time which cries out for expression and a sense of future but which, invisible to most, remains largely ignored. This presentation will include audio excerpts and images intended to demonstrate a sense of place and a permeating aesthetic alongside a verbal presentation and discussion.

Marcial Echenique (Architecture, University of Cambridge)

nfrastructures of Utopia: The University of the African Future, Rising from the Ashes of L'Ecole Normale William Ponty Ferdinand De Jong (Anthropology, University of East Anglia) Co-authored by Brian Quinn (French, UCLA)

Mobilizing the Development Narrative: South Korean Developmental Visions for Infrastructure, Domestic and Southeast Asia, 1956-1973 John DiMoia (History, National University of Singapore)

Professor Elleke Boehmer (Faculty of English, Oxford University) Dominic Davies (Faculty of English, Oxford University) Abstract Elleke Boehmer (Network Convener) and Dominic Davies (Network Facilitator) Our discussion paper will consider performance as a mode of resistance to structures of urban planned violence and the capacity of performance to mount a platform for effective political action. Throughout, the paper will respond to certain challenges and tensions surrounding performance as resistance that emerged out of the first Leverhulme Planned Violence workshop on 30th and 31st January 2014, held at KCL. We will explore how different kinds of performance including theatre and street art can deconstruct structural violence and initiate trajectories of resistance and social change within an urban context. With the increasing infrastructural regulation of spatial movement and the growing capitalist standardisation and engineering of physical space, to what extent do these performances actually resist, and to what extent can they become complicit? These questions will be brought to bear on several of the Planned Violence presentations, looking at: changing usages of urban space and the ability to walk through them, as discussed by Iain Sinclair and Ivan Vladislavic; the historical excavations of cityscapes as discussed by Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe; and emerging forms of artistic and performative resistance such as graffiti, street art and the Greenwich and Lewisham Young People's Theatre's play, Brothers.

Alex Vasudevan (University of Nottingham) Abstract In this paper I explore the history of squatting in Berlin from the late 1960s to the present. The paper pays particular attention to the ways in which squatting and other occupation-based practices re-imagined the city as a space of refuge, gathering and subversion. If squatting came to represent a necessary protest against housing precarity, my main aim here is to show how it also served as a constituent protest for alternative ways of living together in increasingly divided and unequal urban settings. Drawing on extensive archival and ethnographic fieldwork, I explore how squatting became the basis for the composition of a radical domiciliary politics where the very practices of ‘occupation’ acted as both a precarious form of urban dwelling and as an informal autonomous approach to re-thinking the urban. As I hope to show, the micro-geographies of occupation established a different social ontology that moved beyond conventional formulations or bracketings of the ‘political.’ But more than this, a thick description of the Berliner Besetzerszene also offers, I argue, three essential orientations towards a radical geography of infrastructure: firstly a detailed empirical focus on the production of alternative urban spaces with a particular emphasis on the processes through which political horizons are made, unmade, and remade; secondly a theoretical imaginary that extends our understanding of how emancipatory urban politics are assembled, contested and made ‘common’; and thirdly, an historical perspective that re-imagines the city as a living archive of alternative knowledges, materials and resources.

Andrew Harris (University College London) Abstract This paper uses an empirical focus on transport projects in contemporary Mumbai to challenge the assumption that urban infrastructural networks have become increasingly physically, geographically and culturally invisible. The paper argues that large elevated transport structures have been constructed in Mumbai over the last fifteen years as much for their visibility and infrastructural charisma as for their technocratic role in addressing issues of congestion. Politicians have been keen to use vertical transport projects as a means of demonstrating and promoting, across a broad range of social groups, their efforts at inculcating the spectacular, modern and world-class city. The political performance of four specific projects will be detailed: the 55 Flyover Project, the Bandra-Worli Sealink, the Mumbai Skywalk Project and the Thane Station Area Improvement Scheme. The paper concludes by exploring the implications of this important role for infrastructural visibility in making smaller-scale and more sustainable transport schemes politically viable.

The Elusive Lab: Roundtable on Scientific Infrastructure in Africa Professor David Dunne (Department of Pathology, University of Cambridge) Dr Wenzel Geissler (Division Social Anthropology, University of Oslo and University of Cambridge) Dr Ferdinand Okwaro (African Studies, University of Cambridge) Dr Branwyn Poleykett (Division Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge Dr Noemi Tousignant (Division Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge Professor James Wood (Department of Veterinary Medicine) Session Abstract From self-representations of early Imperial scientists to critical analyses by historians of colonial science a century later, Africa has been described as a laboratory, notably of medical and biological sciences, and by extension of social and political forms. In practice, this trope points to the fact that Africa itself was then the site of experimentation, a vast field of data collection connected to sites of analysis largely located outside the continent. Transnational configurations of African science have limited investments in actual lab infrastructure on the continent. Before the 1940s, there were few efforts to build up coherent laboratory infrastructures beyond isolated outposts of metropolitan institutions. More recently the decay of these structures and those built during the developmental decades of the 1940s-1970s, and the concomitant rise of few globally networked high-end research laboratories lends the image of Africa as field-cum-laboratory new purchase. The tension referenced by this metaphor - between science and empire, between human bodies, knowledge, power and value – and the questions it raises about the place of Africa in a global division of scientific labour remain pertinent. This panel discussion addresses these issues through a more limited and material focus on African laboratories as buildings, apparatus, technicians and routines –exploring memories and remains of their pasts, their present state and future promise. Laboratories in Africa are critical sites for diagnosing diseases and maintaining human well-being; they train future technologists, doctors and scientists; they can serve to inform governments and policy through regular survey and monitoring data; and they produce, under shifting global regimes and priorities, scientific knowledge. Yet although the continent does need more and better laboratories, it is less clear what kinds of labs, for what purpose and for whom. Today’s panel brings together leading life-scientists with extensive experience from health research and laboratory work, and the making of laboratories in Africa, and anthropologists and historians of African science, to address questions of the past and future of labs as scientific infrastructure in Africa: What have been the obstacles to building up lab infrastructures in Africa, and how might these change? What has motivated the creation of labs in Africa? How have developments in scientific and health technology, from scientific miniaturisation (test kits, mobile phone diagnostics…) to networked extension of science (data pooling, multi-site research consortia…), changed what counts as an effective lab in Africa? What futures do African laboratories hold, what labs will be needed in the future, and how does one build, a century or more into the ‘African laboratory’, laboratory infrastructure that is relevant to African needs and materially and scientifically sustainable?

Session Theme: Camps as Infrastructure: Spatial and Everyday Perspectives Irit Katz Feigis (Department of Architecture, University of Cambridge) 1) Infrastructure of suspended temporariness - Camps as the hidden spatio-political mechanism of the nation-state Dr Silvia Pasquetti (Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge) 2) Camp Infrastructure and The Production of Meanings and Emotions Abstract 1 Infrastructure of suspended temporariness - Camps as the hidden spatio-political mechanism of the nation-state Camps have been widely used by national and colonial powers in order to gain control over territories, create new settlements and manage local populations. The notion of ‘the camp’ relates to a piece of land which is included within the state’s territory yet placed outside the normal juridical order. In a state of emergency temporary spaces have become an instrument which translates a strategic need, a humanitarian crisis or a political agenda into an ad-hoc act of construction where civilian life and military action interact. Since the appearance of the first civic camps of colonial struggles in Africa and South America at the end of the nineteenth century, through World War II concentration and internment camps constructed in Europe, North America and elsewhere, until today’s refugee and detention camps for illegal or displaced people – camps were and still are erected in varied spatial forms, both formal and informal, to fence or defence specific populations. This paper will examine the camp as an infrastructure of suspended temporariness, a hidden spatio-political mechanism which is globally used by nation-states to manage territory and population. Different camp types created in Israel/Palestine for varied purposes from past until present as well as other manifestations of camps created elsewhere will be used in order to analyse the common characteristics of ‘the camp’ and their meaning. The paper will also explore the inherent spatial diversity of the camps, which spans between rigid spaces of confinement and informal spaces of abandonment and neglect. Abstract 2 Camp Infrastructure and The Production of Meanings and Emotions During my first visit to an “unrecognized” Arab district in Lod, an Israeli city, the first thing I noticed was that the infrastructure of the district resembled that of a West Bank refugee camp where I had previously conducted fieldwork: unpaved roads, leaking sewage, unfinished buildings, and rusty trash cans. Yet, as I discovered during my staying in the city, similar infrastructures can be imbued with very different meanings and emotions by the people who use them as well as by external observers. This paper explores how the precarious and unfinished infrastructures of the urban district and those of the refugee camp—infrastructures that are “suspended in time” and remain “out of place” within the national order of things—intersect with broader ethnonational imaginaries and histories to produce distinct meanings and emotions among Palestinian refugees, Israeli Palestinians, and Jewish Israelis. Specifically it offers some comparative insights on the circulation of the image of “the camp” as it relates to the infrastructures of the urban district. First, I explore how Arab residents of the urban district evoke the image of the “refugee camp” in their comments on the infrastructures of their district to express their feelings of being stigmatized by the state or, in the aftermath of a house demolition, their fear of being displaced and becoming refugees. Second, I highlight how Jewish Israelis also express feelings of fear in relation to the physical conditions of the district through a two-step perceptual process linking dysfunctional infrastructures (for example, dirty roads or inadequate trash bins) and “refugee camps,” and then connecting “refugee camps” and the production of violent dispositions. Third, I discuss “the view” from the West Bank camp, focusing on the interpretive work done by camp dwellers to separate the meanings attached to the camp infrastructure—its deficiencies as well as its planned improvements—and the feelings of pride and the political claims that they attach to their group lives inside the camp.