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Concrete Dreamworlds: The Gendered Politics of Socialist Infrastructure
09 December 2021, 5:00 pm–6:00 pm
material.city Special Seminar: This talk examines dreams of socialist modernity attached to concrete through the lens of gender.
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
UCL Anthropology
This talk examines dreams of socialist modernity attached to concrete through the lens of gender. It applies feminist perspectives on noncapitalist infrastructure to the study of building materials and their ecologies in the social imagination.
Tracing the gendered division of labor historically from stone quarries and cement factories to construction sites, it examines the role that Vietnamese women have played in the building of concrete urban futures. In so doing, it asks: what new insights can gender bring to analyses of the material and sociopolitical dimensions of infrastructure?
About the Speaker
Christina Schwenkel
Professor of Anthropology and Director of Southeast Asian Studies at University of California, Riverside
Christina Schwenkel is Professor of Anthropology and Director of Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Riverside, and member of the editorial collective, Roadsides. She is the author of The American War in Contemporary Vietnam: Transnational Remembrance and Representation (Indiana University Press, 2009), in addition to articles on urban infrastructure, memory and materiality, affect and design. Her new book, Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam (Duke University Press, 2020) is an historical ethnography of the cycles of urban destruction, reconstruction, and decay through a focus on the “unplanned obsolescence” of modernist mass housing.