Chakad Ojani
Postdoktor vid Institutionen för kulturantropologi och etnologi; Kulturantropologi; Anställda
- E-post:
- chakad.ojani@antro.uu.se
- Besöksadress:
- Thunbergsvägen 3 H
- Postadress:
- Box 631
751 26 Uppsala
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Kort presentation
Jag är en socialantropolog med en specialisering på relationen mellan infrastruktur och miljö. Mina forskningsintressen kretsar främst kring de socio-politiska processer som infrastrukturer både möjliggör och förhindrar. Jag arbetar för närvarande med ett bokprojekt om dimfångst i Peru.
Nyckelord
- atmosphere
- conservation
- data
- environment
- ethnography
- infrastructure
- outer space
- science fiction
- speculation
- sts
- urban studies
- water
Forskning
Oceans in the sky: Conservation, infrastructure, and ecologies of fog capture in coastal Peru
My current book project draws on twelve months of ethnographic research on material engagements with fog on the margins of the city of Lima and coastal Peru more broadly. The book examines the politics of contemporary urban and environmental relations in these places of aridity, where glacial retreat and rapid urban expansion raise concerns about water scarcity and the gradual disappearance of urban fog oasis ecosystems. I describe how a local NGO and a network of fog oasis conservationists tried to use the steady inflow of coastal fog as a potential water source. Of particular concern is how their different modes of engaging with fog were sometimes at odds with one another: whereas the NGO installed fog catchers for residents in informal or recently formalized neighborhoods, the conservationists harnessed ground-touching clouds in order to make those very same areas uninhabitable for informal squatters. In setting out to capture fog so as to attain their respective goals, my interlocutors became ensnared in one another’s activities, demands, and expectations. The book frames these relations as constitutive of an ecology of capture: an emergent web of relationships held together by conflicting aims and expectations, the possibilities and limits of fog capture, and the material qualities of fog itself.
Infrastructuring the extra-terrestrial, un-earthing anthropology: Sweden in the new space age
Over the past years, Sweden has begun to expand its sounding rocket range with a view to develop small satellite launch capability. The Swedish space strategy is symptomatic of broader, speculative engagements with the extra-terrestrial as a domain for projection, experimentation, and infrastructural possibility, able to support and/or limit human life on Earth. This is evident not least in how orbital space has emerged as a key arena for addressing contemporary planetary challenges such as climate change. Meanwhile, a growing private space industry has started to push former government-centred paradigms towards opening up a free-market space frontier. However, with the increasing reliance on post-terrestrial infrastructures, orbital debris and geomagnetic storms present new risks to critical, ground-based infrastructures. My project takes these developments as an impetus to explore the making and reshaping of (extra-)planetary ecologies through various forms of infrastructural mediation. Specifically, I examine the discursive, material, and speculative practices whereby environments both on and off Earth become reimagined and modified amid burgeoning efforts geared towards the infrastructuring of Earth orbit and beyond. In attending to these processes, my project ultimately seeks to elucidate the possibilities and limitations of a geocentric politics of environment and climate change.
Publikationer
Urval av publikationer
- Ecology of capture (2024)
- The Promise of Fog Capture (2023)
- Urban fog oasis conservation: Endangerment, invasiones and informal urbanization in Lima (2023)
- Smallness and Small-device Heuristics: Scaling Fog Catchers Down and Up in Lima, Peru (2023)
- Experimenting with fog: Environmental infrastructures, infrastructuring environments, and the infrastructure of infrastructure (2023)
- Material engagements with fog in Lima (2023)
- Speculative relations in Lima (2022)
- Water in atmospheric suspension (2022)
- Displacing (in)formality: Endangered species, endangered city, and unstable grounds of comparison (2022)
- Infrastructures, Anthropology of (2021)
Senaste publikationer
- Ecology of capture (2024)
- Infrastructures and environments in late industrialism (2024)
- As Above, So Below: Vertical Territory in Northern Sweden (2023)
- Miljöarbetet i Lima krockar med stadens utsatta invånare (2023)
- Sadana, Rashmi. The moving city: scenes from the Delhi Metro and the social life of infrastructure. viii, 251 pp., maps, illus., bibliogr. Oakland: Univ. of California Press, 2022. £25.00 (2023)
Alla publikationer
Artiklar
- Ecology of capture (2024)
- Infrastructures and environments in late industrialism (2024)
- As Above, So Below: Vertical Territory in Northern Sweden (2023)
- Miljöarbetet i Lima krockar med stadens utsatta invånare (2023)
- Sadana, Rashmi. The moving city: scenes from the Delhi Metro and the social life of infrastructure. viii, 251 pp., maps, illus., bibliogr. Oakland: Univ. of California Press, 2022. £25.00 (2023)
- The Promise of Fog Capture (2023)
- Smallness and Small-device Heuristics: Scaling Fog Catchers Down and Up in Lima, Peru (2023)
- Experimenting with fog: Environmental infrastructures, infrastructuring environments, and the infrastructure of infrastructure (2023)
- Material engagements with fog in Lima (2023)
- Ethnographic research of outer space (2023)
- Anthropology against, of, and with data practices (2022)
- Speculative relations in Lima (2022)
- Water in atmospheric suspension (2022)
- Displacing (in)formality: Endangered species, endangered city, and unstable grounds of comparison (2022)
- Speculations on Islamic sonic-aeolian cosmotechnics (2022)
- Exploring the extraplanetary: Social studies of outer space (2022)
- Multiple nature-cultures, diverse anthropologies (2021)
- Living Water, living with lively waters (2021)
- Hannah Knox, Thinking Like a Climate: Governing a City in Times of Environmental Change. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 328, 2020 (2021)
- Aeolian politics and the duograph (2021)
- Fallout, security, and alternative planetary futures (2021)
- Infrastructuralizing outer space, un-earthing anthropology (2021)
- The (ontological) politics of fog capture in Lima, Peru (2021)
- Were, Graeme. 2019. How materials matter: design, innovation and materiality in the Pacific. New York: Berghahn Books. 212 pp. Hb.: US$120.00. ISBN: 9781789202014 (2020)
- Atmospheric failure (2020)
- Attunements to fog: Capture as an idiom for more-than-human entanglements (2020)
- #Failures (2020)