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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Infrastructure's (Supra)Sacralizing Effects: Contesting Littoral Spaces Of Fishing, Faith, And Futurity Along Sri Lanka's Western Coastline, Orlando Woods
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
This paper explores the ways in which infrastructural development can cause the sacred to become a source of political legitimacy, and sacred authority to become a politically charged construct. For resource-dependent communities, the ecological damage caused by infrastructural development can cause ostensibly profane issues to be imbued with sacred meaning and value. With sacralization comes the expectation that figures of sacred authority will campaign for justice on behalf of the communities that they represent. However, when the authority evoked comes from outside the boundaries of institutionalized religion, processes of suprasacralization come into play. By exploring infrastructure’s (supra)sacralizing effects, I demonstrate …
Access To Power: Electricity And The Infrastructural State In Pakistan, Ijlal Naqvi
Access To Power: Electricity And The Infrastructural State In Pakistan, Ijlal Naqvi
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Pakistan would desperately like to produce enough electricity, but it usually doesn’t. This is the rare issue on which government and private sector can unite, and it is the cause of suffering for rich and poor alike across the entirety of the country. Despite prioritization by successive governments, targeted reforms shaped by international development actors, and featuring prominently in Chinese Belt and Road Investments, the Pakistani power sector still stifles economic and social life across the country. This book explores state capacity in Pakistan by following the material infrastructure of electricity across the provinces and down into cities and homes. …
Contesting Access To Power In Urban Pakistan, Ijlal Naqvi
Contesting Access To Power In Urban Pakistan, Ijlal Naqvi
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
Studies of informal housing and urban citizenship in South Asia frequently link the precariousness of squatter life with the struggle to formalize engagement with the state. However, this article argues that the transition to a more formal mode of making claims on the state is a shift in terrain that is no less negotiated and contested. Through an ethnography of access to electrical power in Islamabad, Pakistan, this article explores the pervasiveness of informality in access to service delivery for a squatter settlement and its bourgeois neighbors. The politics of access to urban infrastructure reveal a state of pervasive predation …