Homing as infrastructural labour: gender and housing in Kolkata's poor communities

Öffentlicher Vortrag von Dr. Henrike Donner (Goldsmiths University, London) im Rahmen des Ethnologischen Kolloquiums

Datum: 26. März 2024
Zeit: 16.15 Uhr bis 17.45 Uhr
Ort: Universität Luzern, Raum 4.B02

Infrastructures have gained prominence in theories of urbanism drawing on the experiences of cities in the Global South. This article interrogates how poor women's homing practices present infrastructural labour in the course of struggles over housing based on research in Kolkata, India. 

It argues that poor women’s homemaking creates urban life in the face of state disinvestment and a politics of dispossession and suggests that in order to address the current crisis of care we need to pay attention to the way such labour is distributed across time and space in the making of the city. In this context, the paper looks at what makes the conditions of dwelling in these places possible, with a particular focus on gendered (and caste/religion/ethnicity-) based regimes that create homes under processes of neoliberal economic conditions of governance that build on colonial exclusions.