Seminars/Lectures

Mega-Development as Political Work in the Age of Mass Democracy: Infrastructure and Populism in Bangladesh

Nusrat Chowdhury
Tue
Nov
19

Nusrat Chowdhury
Kellogg Visiting Fellow

How does development infrastructure help us understand the way populism functions in the global south? This lecture, drawing from Nustrat Chowdhury's ethnographic project around the longest river bridge in Bangladesh , addresses this question by exploring how mega-infrastructure has become a strategy through which increasingly authoritarian regimes seek populist legitimacy. Focusing on the concept of “infrastructural populism,” it asks: How does spectacular development aimed at mass political appeal help us grasp the ways in which new versions of democratic authoritarianisms are thriving in the global south? How and why is the democratic ideal compromised in the obsessive investment in megaprojects? And, despite its impressive visual appeal, how does language offer insights into the ways in which infrastructure is accommodated in everyday life? Once completed, the book will contribute to distinct areas of scholarship, namely, the political life of infrastructure; populism in the global south; and, rumor and hearsay as form of political communication.

 


Speakers / Related People
Nusrat Chowdhury

Political anthropologist Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury is associate professor of anthropology at Amherst College. Her research and writing focus on the affective and aesthetic dimensions of postcolonial democracies, especially in the context of popular sovereignty and political communication.  Her first book, Paradoxes of the Popular: Crowd Politics in Bangladesh (2019), is an ethnography of the crowd...
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