IBS Speaker Series: Yaffa Truelove

Join in person at IBS 155 or via Zoom, email ibs-contact@colorado.edu for the password.
*Light lunch served at 11:45 a.m.

Title: The Prosthetics of Infrastructure: Invisible Bodies, Devalued Labor and the Everyday Circulation of Water in Delhi

Bio: Yaffa Truelove is an Associate Professor of Geography and International Affairs at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her research examines urban and feminist political ecologies of water, southern and comparative urbanism, and the everyday infrastructures and governance of Indian cities. She has published widely in journals including Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Geoforum, Environment and Planning D, and Urban Geography. She is the co-editor of the recently published book Gendered Infrastructures: Space, Scale, and Identity and is currently conducting research on waterless cities in North India.

Abstract: This paper interrogates the relationship between the body and socio-material dimensions of infrastructure in the city. Although a burgeoning interdisciplinary literature has been attentive to the socio-material features of infrastructure, the generative relationship between infrastructure and the body has received less attention. Bringing a feminist political ecology lens to critical infrastructure studies, I show how gendered/casted/classed bodies act as part of urban infrastructure through the quotidian practices and labor of finding and circulating water to households across neighborhoods. I specifically use the concept-metaphor of “prosthesis” as a heuristic devise to help show when and how bodies become “internalized” as part of infrastructural networks and to render visible often overlooked dimensions of infrastructure and our analytic view of it. Drawing from fieldwork on water infrastructures in Delhi, India, I argue that conceptualizing the body as a prosthesis to infrastructure helps make visible 1) the embodied labor, maintenance and care work that subsidizes and enables infrastructural assemblages and networks, 2) the socio-political processes and forces that produce the necessity for particular gendered/casted/racialized/classed bodies to act as infrastructure in the first place, and 3) the valuation/devaluation of labor and lives in relation to (urban) infrastructure. I conclude by calling for further analyses of the body as the site by which the sociopolitical and material dimensions of infrastructure are affected, resisted, negotiated, and lived.