How to Study an Infrastructure: Technicality, Illegality, Bureaucracy

How do we study an infrastructure as a regime of governance? How do we wrestle with highly technical sites, assess the politics of mechanical assemblages, and tease apart the human from the nonhuman in them? How do we access secretive and securitized knowledge? How do we present ourselves to fieldwork interlocutors we do not like? How do we represent them? What is the role of note-taking in all this? This talk, about infrastructures of oil refining and retail in India, discusses the methodological challenges of studying infrastructures that are expansive, multi-sited, highly technical, riddled with secrets, gendered, and populated by those that anthropologists are often ideologically opposed to. Through her fieldwork in India across oil refineries, ports, distribution terminals, ministry offices, and retail shops, Dr. Sarandha Jain will discuss how she addressed these challenges, but also opened the questions for dialogue about how else they might be addressed and what might be lost and gained through this kind of a study.
 
Dr. Sarandha Jain is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto in the Department of Anthropology and the Institute for Environment, Conservation, and Sustainability, with an affiliation to the Ethnography Lab and the Technoscience Research Unit. Her work studies how the energy regime of oil mediates the relationship between the Indian state and citizens. She investigates how regimes of chemical governance encode sociopolitical possibilities into petroleum products, how they play out and are also distorted during distribution and consumption, and how this determines state-citizen relations. Sarandha holds a PhD from the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University (New York) and completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at The New School.