When Infrastructures Attack: The Politics of Disrepair in China

Julie Chu from the University of Chicago will discuss possibilities of political agency and redress at the intersection of two recent trends in China. Part of the East Asian Colloquium.

This talk explores the possibilities of political agency and redress at the intersection of two recent trends in China: when a sweeping boom in land development and construction meets a growing apparatus of legal and bureaucratic reforms.  Specifically, Chu is interested in the relationship between eventfulness and politicization as housing disputes have become increasingly routinized through formal channels of administrative and legal mediation even as the informalities of state violence and civilian unrest seem to persist and proliferate in ongoing struggles over urban redevelopment.  This is a redrawing of the political landscape, as she will show, that has brought infrastructure and its various unruly parts to the fore, making both state claims and citizen protests ever more contingent on the lively collaboration of materials “underneath” the usual scenes of encounter.  Chu’s aim is to analyze the conditions through which certain workings of infrastructures come into focus as an enabling or disabling force in the course of everyday political struggles over the remaking of a Chinese neighborhood.

Julie Y. Chu is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago and author of Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China (Duke University Press, 2010).  Her current project examines border technologies and the various infrastructures in place (legal-rational, financial, cosmic, piratical) for managing the flows of people and things between Southern China and the United States.

(Light refreshments will be served. You are also welcome to bring your own lunch.) 

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