9:00am - 10:30am Water Politics and Contestations
This panel examines infrastructural challenges related to water and political and social contestations around water, including hydropower development, sanitation, community water access, and the consequences of climate change.
Speakers:
Yaffa Truelove听(Geography, CU Boulder )
Nga Dao听(Geography, York University )
Win Myo Thu听(Myanmar activist)
James Harper听(CU Boulder)
惭辞诲别谤补迟辞谤:听Zannah Matson听(Environmental Design, CU听Boulder)
Yaffa Truelove
Embodying the Waterscape: Gendered infrastructures and the urban 鈥榠n-between鈥� in Delhi, India
This paper takes an embodied approach to the lived experiences and everyday politics of liminal neighborhoods and infrastructures in Delhi鈥檚 unauthorized colonies, which lack official entitlements to networked infrastructures such as water and sewerage. Bringing a feminist political ecology lens to critical infrastructure studies, I show how gendered social relations, subjectivities, and the unequal experience of urban liminality are tied to accessing water and its fragmented infrastructures beyond the network. In particular, liminal infrastructural space is produced in unauthorized colonies through not only these neighborhoods鈥� quasi-legal status and unequal access to urban water, but also through gendered discourses and the socially differentiated ways water infrastructures are co-produced, managed, and made livable by residents. As water is primarily accessed beyond the network via tubewells and tankers, I demonstrate how these fractured modalities ultimately constitute gendered infrastructural assemblages that enable water鈥檚 circulation across neighborhoods but also serve to deepen forms of gendered marginality and differentiation. Here, gendered infrastructural practices and labor to negotiate and supplement fragmented components of water infrastructure shape subjectivities and possibilities for social relations and urban claims-making. These infrastructural assemblages expose both the situated experience of urban liminality, as well as its transcendent possibilities.
Yaffa Truelove is an Assistant Professor of Geography and International Affairs at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her research focuses on urban and feminist political ecologies of water, the politics of infrastructure, southern urbanism, and the everyday governance of cities, with a focus on India. Her publications include the recent book Gendered Infrastructures: Space Scale and Identity and numerous articles in journals such as Environment and Planning D, Geoforum, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Urban Geography, and Political Geography.
Nga Dao
Small hydropower, slow violence, and gendered struggles in Northwest Vietnam
Small hydropower has widely been considered as a renewable energy with minimum adverse social and environmental impacts. However, the expansion of small hydropower in the northwest uplands of Vietnam over the last two decades has created and even normalized persistent and multidimensional water injustice for ethnic minority groups in the region. For some, this expansion has meant persistent, but silent, generational, and cumulative experiences of marginalization and impoverishment, and the erosion of a way of life. Extractive activities redistribute resources and decision-making power, reconstruct identities, but not without igniting resistance. Local ethnic minority households struggle in negotiating their everyday realities, which has been occupied with livelihood maintenance, social interactions, and fights over their use/control of resources. This is characterised as a type of 鈥渟low violence鈥� (Nixon 2011) or 鈥渟low dissent鈥� (Murrey 2016) that has spanned generations and is often overlooked. My work unravels the particular gendered workings of this slow violence, drawing on over a decade of fieldwork in the northwest uplands where hundreds of small hydro-development projects have been planned and implemented since early 2000s. Women鈥檚 daily work like cooking, weaving and dying fabrics or growing vegetables might seem trivial but when viewed from a gender lens are crucial to enabling community resilience, solidarity and resistance in the face of persistently imposed forms of injustice and suffering.
Nga Dao holds a PhD in Geography from York University, an MA from Cornell University, and a MSc from SOAS, University of London.听Nga has conducted research on topics including development-induced displacement in Southeast Asia, gender equality and women鈥檚 role in water resource governance, agri-business, mining, and land grabbing. Nga is now focusing on slow violence and water (in)justice;听river ecologies, gender, and youth roles in livelihood changes in the Mekong region, exploring how the local landscape has been transformed through expansion of boom crops, industrialization, resource (land & water) degradation and migration.听She has published her work in various peer-review journals, including the Journal of Peasant Studies, Journal of Agrarian Change, Canadian Journal of Development Studies, Critical Asian Studies, Water Alternatives, Journal of Asia Pacific Viewpoint, and Journal of Gender, Places and Culture.
奥颈苍听惭测辞听罢丑耻
Hydro politics and environmental justice issue in Myanmar
I will be talking about Hydro politics in Myanmar. This is to retrospectively look at the experiences of Myanmar鈥檚 civil society organizations (CSO) and environmental activists in mobilizing the nationwide campaign against the construction of the Myitsone hydropower dam over the Irrawaddy River, which is referred to as our mother nature by the people of Myanmar. This hydro-power dam project was a 3.6 billion US $ investment by China Power Investment (CPI) to build 7 cascade dams from 2011 to 2017 in the upper watershed of Myanmar to generate 6000 MW of electricity, for which 90% is to be sold to China. Listening to the public outcry over the social and environmental concerns of the project, the Myanmar government ordered the suspension of dam construction in 2011. China was surprised by the unilateral decision by the Myanmar government. CPI demanded substantial financial compensation and lobbied for the continuation of the project. The Western governments welcomed the decision made by the Myanmar government. They saw it as a government commitment to democratic reform by enabling the people to have freedom of expression and social mobilization. Civil society organizations (CSOs) further stepped up to enlarge the political space for the environmental justice movement to address the issues of land grabbing, illegal logging, transparency, and accountability of the extractive industry. On the other hand, the Sino-Myanmar relationship was frozen, and China鈥檚 investment sharply decreased in Myanmar, which hurt Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and affected Myanmar鈥檚 economy. In my talk, I will highlight the factors contributing to the success of citizen campaigns and how political space was created under the iron grip of military rulers. Furthermore, I would like to brainstorm the theoretical and practical applications of the 鈥淧recaution Principle,鈥� a fundamental safeguarding rule for environmental justice. 听
Mr听奥颈苍听惭测辞听罢丑耻听is a development practitioner with over 30 years of extensive experience in environmental conservation and rural development. I professionally contributed to several policy developments, including the National Communication Report on climate change, the National Biodiversity Strategic Action Plan (NBSAP), the National Environmental Performance Assessment, the National Rural Development Strategic Framework for poverty reduction, and the Myanmar Sustainable Development Plan (MSDP). In addition to these contributions, I have been actively advocating for the cancellation of hydropower mega-dams, promoting renewable energy, improving land tenure security of the poor and indigenous people, and strengthening a common platform for civic empowerment in natural resource governance. I direct a local environmental organization, the Association of Advancing Life and Regenerating Motherland (ALARM). After the 2021 military coup in Myanmar, I moved to Oxford University, UK, and am currently a Visiting Research Fellow at Christ Church College and the Earth Science Department. I will continue researching environmental justice as a visiting scholar at George Washington University in the United States, commencing in April 2024. I graduated from Yangon University/Yezin Agriculture Institute with a B.Sc (Forestry Science) and from the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), Thailand, with an M.Sc in Rural and Regional Development Planning.
James Harper
Sanitation, The Forgotten Sister of Water
Water is life and has thus received the focus of international development organizations the world over. However, to the detriment of public health, sanitation 鈥� the management of human excreta 鈥� remains largely forgotten, resulting in the pollution of water sources and the requirement of more demanding treatment processes for drinking water. Human excreta from a single household, even one with a latrine, can contaminate the groundwater of their community, and the excreta from an entire city can choke rivers, contaminate agricultural areas, and change environmental systems drastically. With the addition of climate change, these effects increase stress on environmental systems and make treatment processes more difficult or restricted. This talk provides a review of the interactions between water and sanitation in various Southeast Asian countries and then dives into current efforts to improve sanitation systems that aim to protect water sources. Novel research is summarized and placed into context, highlighting remaining problems including reaching scale and barriers to success. Let鈥檚 talk about water鈥檚 forgotten sister 鈥� sanitation 鈥� and the direct connections between them.
With extensive experience in research; mechanical and civil engineering; STEM education; and behavioral science, James Harper focuses on engineering sustainable societies in low-resource contexts and educating youth in high-resource contexts about related topics. His work focuses on how rural households make decisions about their basic needs, and he's worked primarily on infrastructure development projects in sanitation, water, housing, electricity, and nutrition in rural Cambodia, Vietnam, Bangladesh and India. Outside of work, he's volunteered extensively for mountain rescue and as a volunteer firefighter, and enjoys hiking and traveling with his wife, son, and rescued pit bull.
Zannah Matson听is an Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado Program in Environmental Design and PhD Candidate in Human Geography at the University of Toronto. Her research and design听work听focuses on the histories and contemporary reinterpretations of landscapes throughout processes of colonization, extraction, and state infrastructure projects. She is an active member of Beyond Extraction, which is a collective of researchers, writers, artists, and activists who come together to critically investigate and resist extraction in its various forms. She has a Master in Landscape Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
10:45am - 12:15pm Social Fluidities 1: Transnational Solidarities, Social Movements, and Migration
This panel explores social fluidities and circulations, including how the rise of transnational solidarities, cross-border social movements, and global migrations are reshaping social and political life in Asia.听
Speakers:
Andrew Le听(Sociology, Arizona State University)
Purvi Mehta听(Anthropology, Colorado College)
Clara Lee听(Anthropology, CU Boulder)
惭辞诲别谤补迟辞谤:听Shae Frydenlund听(Center for Asian Studies, CU听Boulder)
Andrew Le
The Art of Migration: How Aspiring Migrants Navigate a Broker-Centric Migration System in Vietnam
States across the Global South have witnessed historic privatization of their migration systems over the last few decades. This talk explores the cultural and cognitive processes through which migrants make sense of and navigate a broker-centric migration system. Based on 224 interviews and 15 months of fieldwork across Vietnam 鈥� a country whose migration system is heavily reliant on migrant brokers 鈥� this talk examines how migrants develop and deploy broker wisdom, a unique cultural schema, where migrants refashion migrant brokerage activity to be more听legible听and subsequently manipulable. I first show how migrants mobilize distinct forms of everyday resistance to make sense of and navigate migrant brokerage. I then explore how the development and deployment of broker wisdom have implications for migrant brokerage and Vietnam鈥檚 broader migration project.
Andrew Le is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University. He received his PhD from UCLA鈥檚 Sociology Department. Andrew鈥檚 research interests include international migration, race & ethnicity, Asia/Asia America, political & global sociology, and qualitative research methods. He is currently working on his book project,听Brokerage and the Art of Migration.听
Purvi Mehta
Empathy and Imagination in Transnational Analogies of Caste and Race
On Capitol Hill on Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2014, members of the African American Legacy Families announced a 鈥淒eclaration of Empathy鈥� for Dalits in South Asia. While most scholarly comparisons of race and caste focus on their structural and ideological similarities, at this event, a cross-border analogy was inspired by imaginative and affective understanding, connection, and care. In this paper, I analyze materials related to the planning of the 鈥淒eclaration of Empathy鈥� and draw on interviews with its creators to explore empathy as a social and political relation that enables transnational social fluidity and affiliation. I historicize the event as part of a long history of connections between African Americans and Dalits and suggest that emotional recognition and affective understanding have been important catalysts for transnational analogies and solidarities.听
Purvi Mehta is an associate professor in the History Department at Colorado College. She is working on a book about transnational Dalit activism and the internationalization of caste discrimination.
Clara Hwayeon Lee
Radical Experience as Relations: Understanding Soseong-ri鈥檚 Anti-Base Peace Movement through Fluidity
Many anti-base movements in South Korea have formed first as local resistance and then develop into broader national and transnational coalitions/network building beyond different politics of location and positionality. Broad anti-base coalitions across local, national, and transnational communities are essential for mobilizing short and long-term anti-base movements. The resistance to the US military Missile Defense base in Soseong-ri, South Korea, had a similar origin but a different outcome. The Soseong-ri peace movement began as a popular struggle in Seongju-gun in 2016-17 until it became more isolated and marginalized because of state-driven liberal governance of gallachigi (divide and rule) that hinged on the fixedness of rights claiming. In what ways does the logic of identity and rights classification facilitate cooperation in coalition-building while organizing differences among actors? By considering how inspirational moments of transborder encounters exceed the boundaries of fixed identities in Soseong-ri鈥檚 peace movement, I imagine the possibility of framing politics through the analytical tool of fluidity and plurality. I argue that thinking about personal and social transformation through the concept of fluidity provides a productive glimpse into how ideas, practices, and local, national, and global histories are remade.
Clara Hwayeon Lee is a PhD Candidate in the Anthropology department currently working on her dissertation research on embodied, expressive, and often invisible forms of dissent adopted by the Korean peace movement. Her research builds on five years of extensive collaborations with anti-base dissent community members organizing a culture of peace on the Korean peninsula. She conducted ethnographic fieldwork from 2022 to 2023 in the small mountainous village of Soseong-ri, South Korea, where the US military installed a missile defense base in 2017. Bringing together scholarship on global militarism, affect, and care, her research broadly asks how US military policy in the Asia Pacific intimately impacts people in those regions whose daily lives are not considered central to large-scale political interventions and how those communities have produced and sustained dissent through everyday experience of care. Prior to joining CU Boulder, she received a joint MA in Anthropology & Women, Gender, and Sexuality studies from Brandeis University and a BA in International Relations from Boston University.
1:30pm - 3:00pm Social Fluidities 2: Environment, Development, and Diaspora听
This panel explores the relationship between material challenges and social life, including how contemporary artists respond to regional environmental challenges, diaspora politics, and contestations around development.听听
Speakers:
Alvin Camba听(Korbel School, University of Denver)
Brianne Cohen听(Art History, CU Boulder)
Dawa Lokyitsang听(Anthropology, CU Boulder)
惭辞诲别谤补迟辞谤:听Kathryn E. Goldfarb听(Anthropology, CU听Boulder)
Alvin Camba
Indigenous Cosmologies and Religiosity: How Indigenous Groups Mobilize Against Chinese Dams in the Philippines
How do indigenous groups mobilize against Chinese projects in the Global South? Existing literature on Chinese capitals focuses on motivations of the Chinese actors, the political or economic impact of the Chinese projects, and the responses of host country elites. However, these works have ignored the agency of indigenous groups in the Global South. Analyzing these groups is crucial for two reasons. First, host country governments externalize project costs onto these groups who have been marginalized in these countries for decades. Second, the lands inhabited by these groups are often unexplored and contain critical resources for economic development. I draw from a 3-month field research conducted among the Kalingan people and the Dumagat-Remontado indigenous group in Northern and Central Philippines respectively. While the former has mobilized against the Chico River Pump Irrigation project, the latter has fought against the Kaliwa Dam. I argue that these groups draw from their cosmologies to mobilize against these two Chinese dams. The groups do these via three mechanisms. First is boundary formation, in which both groups use their Austronesian-specific beliefs to quell disputes among themselves and harden the boundaries between them and outsiders. Second is historical framing, where groups use their cosmologies to situate the Chinese projects within the longer-pattern of historical exploitation by the host country governments. And the final is the reconceptualization of political identities. Groups use their cosmologies to create a new, non-oppressive and relatively symmetric identification with their non-indigenous groups Filipinos in order to gain allies against the Chinese projects.
Alvin Camba听is an Assistant Professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the听University of Denver. He received his PhD in Sociology from the Johns Hopkins University. He听is a faculty affiliate at the Center for International Environment & Resource Policy and the听Climate Policy Lab at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. His research has been awarded听multiple best research paper awards by several academic networks (International Studies听Association, American Sociological Association, GRADNAS), has been published in top听development and political economy journals (e.g., Review of International Political Economy,听Development and Change, Energy Research and Social Science, etc.), and has contributed to听widely-circulated think tank policy papers (e.g. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the听International Republican Institute, and Center for International Private Enterprise) on China鈥檚听activities in Southeast Asia. He has been cited and/or interviewed by The Financial Times,听Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, and other news outlets, and invited to speak at The听World Bank, the US State Department, AidData, etc. Most recently, Dr. Camba is part of the听Carnegie Corporation of New York-funded Responsible Public Engagement project at the Korbel听School. The project investigates, among others, China鈥檚 disinformation strategies and听investments in rare earths.
Brianne Cohen
A Dance Between Dragons: Queering Environmental Relations between Cambodia and China
In his double-screen video installation, Popil (2018), artist Khvay Samnang portrays two female dancers wearing Indigenous-crafted dragon masks as they perform a dance for rain and fertility. Ancient Khmer classical dance was developed as a movement for rain and fertility, with its curvilinear gestures meant to give dancers a serpentine appearance reflecting the flow of water. Yet in Popil, Samnang updates the women鈥檚 traditional dance-drama by filming them in different natural environments throughout Cambodia, attempting to evoke the 鈥渇lows of the nation鈥檚 major rivers, as well as the circulation of capital throughout the nation.鈥� Each woman symbolizes a different 鈥渄ragon鈥� nation, Cambodia and China, and their dance-drama evolves from scenes of courtship and infatuation to conflict, alienation, and abuse. I argue that Popil queers the women鈥檚 dance to suggest the need for a more equitable relationship between the two countries. The artwork challenges China鈥檚 aggressive 鈥渋nvestment鈥� in and violent 鈥渄evelopment鈥� of the Cambodian landscape, where logging, mining, and damming have displaced many communities and destroyed Cambodia鈥檚 ecologies. In the video, the dancers鈥� entwined movements subvert a hierarchical picture of core-periphery relations between the two dragons/nations, ultimately compelling viewers to pay attention to the vulnerable 鈥渂ackground鈥� environment of this updated dance-drama.
Brianne Cohen is Assistant Professor of Art History at the 91制片厂国产AV, where she focuses on contemporary art, visual culture, and the formation of critical publics in Southeast Asia and Europe. Her books include (Duke, 2023) and the co-edited volumes, (Amherst, 2023) and The Photofilmic: Entangled Images in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture (Cornell, 2016). Her new book project analyzes lens-based art in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Singapore that draws on Southeast Asian Indigenous-animist worldviews to galvanize empathy for inanimate matter, plants, animals, and more-than-human environments and to envision more sustainable planetary cohabitation. She serves currently as field editor for contemporary art for and has published in journals such as Art Journal, Representations, Afterimage, Southeast of Now, Journal of European Studies, Third Text, and Image [&] Narrative.
Dawa Lokyitsang
Situating Tibetan Movements and Flows in Chinese Settler Colonialism
Contemporary Tibetan movement and the various flows it generates, whether to the urban enclaves of China or to exile diaspora, cannot be divorced from the settler colonial realities that drive this movement. This presentation will historicize Tibetan movement to exile as a causal impact of a Chinese military invasion of Tibet in 1940. This invasion has since developed into a full scale colonial occupation that continually impacts Tibetan lives and movements today. Global migratory flows of people and goods have been theorized primarily through the frameworks of the market, while this continues to be true, this presentation will highlight Chinese settler colonial occupation as the main driver of Tibetan movements and flows. My presentation will showcase how China鈥檚 new securitization policies in Tibet, operating primarily under the language of development and poverty alleviation schemes, are causing renewed anxieties around the loss of language and identity among Tibetans inside and in the diaspora. I will highlight how the Tibetan diaspora community is addressing these not-so-old anxieties with their own movements and flows that I emphasize as circular rather than linear for meeting current conditions and challenges of Chinese colonialism in Tibet. 听
Dawa Lokyitsang is a Tibetan American political and historical anthropologist. Her research focuses on Tibetan agency in response to China鈥檚 developing imperial-colonialism in Tibet. Her scholarship on Tibetan schools in India historicizes the national agency of Tibetans in exile. She highlights how the preservation of their national and spiritual identity as Tibetans, an identity criminalized and securitized by China in Tibet, became grounds for community building and movement generating efforts that regularly unsettles China鈥檚 settler colonial consumption of Tibet. Her scholarship on the decolonizing agency of Tibetans thus sits at the intersection of developing Asian imperial-colonialisms, reactive anti-colonial nationalisms, and creative Indigenous sovereign-futurisms.
Kathryn Goldfarb is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the 91制片厂国产AV. Her research focuses on the ways social relationships impact embodied experience, intersections between public policy and well-being, and the co-production of scientific knowledge and subjective experiences. Her first book project,听Fragile Kinships: Child Welfare and Well-Being in Japan, forthcoming from Cornell University Press, explores how social inclusion and exclusion shape holistic well-being. She is editor, with Sandra Bamford, of听Difficult Attachments: Anxieties of Kinship and Care, forthcoming from Rutgers University Press. A new US-based project takes the creation of and engagement with atmospheric data as a social field to study ethnographically.
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