Mittwoch
24
MAI

16.15 Uhr

Automobilities and Urban Topologies in Contemporary India: Whose Road is it Anyway? - Prof. Dr. Tarini Bedi (University of Illinois, Department of Anthropology)

Prof. Dr. Tarini Bedi (University of Illinois, Department of Anthropology)

This talk provides some provocations for a topological understanding of urban life using the lens of road infrastructures and automobility in India. I reflect here on automobility and roads from a place and working- class, labor force of drivers who have long been embedded in this expansion— taxi drivers. Most discussions over driving and automobiles tie the proliferation of automobility to the rise of the middle class, consumption, and to the production of middle class subjectivity. Global automobile companies are aggressively trying to capture new consumers and their aspirations for (auto) mobility in countries like India and China at the same time that much of the Western world
is experimenting with alternative forms of mobility. While questions of automobility and class consumption are no doubt, important, in India, a large number of those who drive and use the roads are people (overwhelmingly men), who drive as a form of labor and work—drivers who drive other people and things around on what emerges as something that might be called a road. Rather than simply accept that automobility and road spaces in India produces worlds and spatial politics that mirror those where the automobile was invented, I try to understand these worlds through the conflicting demands of “rights to the road” and road spaces in urban India.

Tarini Bedi is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the 2021-2023 Expanding Internationality Visiting Professor at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Professor Bedi is an urban anthropologist, ethnographer and cultural geographer who conducts research in South and Southeast Asia. Her research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of urban, political, and economic anthropology,
environment and ecology, anthropology of infrastructure and mobilities, cultural geography, science and technology studies, and gender studies.

Adresse

Südasien-Institut

Gebäude 4010, Raum 010.01.05

Voßstr. 2

69115 Heidelberg

Veranstalter

Südasien-Institut - Department of Visual and Media Anthropology (HCTS)

Homepage Veranstalter

www.sai.uni-heidelberg.de