A Talk on “Bulldozers in the City: Machines and the Economies of Excess and Repair” by Dr Sushmita Pati
ABOUT THE TALK
Bulldozers have been ubiquitous machines on the Indian landscape in the last two decades, but of late have been violently deployed by the majoritarian state. This article brings together two very different lives of the machine — one in which the machine becomes the adjudicator of justice through the extrajudicial exercise of power; and the other, that circulates in the construction industry, its repair and refurbishment. It puts science and technological studies in conversation with urban political economy to argue how machines actively shape urban lives through construction and demolition and by being in circulation. By looking more closely at the history of the machine globally and in India, its deployment at sites of demolitions, and its end point in Delhi’s scrap markets, this article uncovers the diverse relationship the machine has with the city and its people. These machines redraw the relationship between state, law, and people on one hand, and buyers, sellers, owners, drivers, and spare‐parts business owners on the other, to show that the political lives of these actors collide and converge but do not remain the same.
The talk will be moderated by Dr Dyotana Banerjee, Assistant Professor of Politics, SIAS, Krea University.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Dr Sushmita Pati is Associate Professor, Political Science at National Law School of India University, Bengaluru. Sushmita’s primary academic intervention has been at the cusp of urban politics and political economy. Her first monograph Properties of Rent: Community, Capital and Politics in Globalising Delhi was published by Cambridge University Press, 2022 and went on to win the prestigious BASAS Book Prize 2024 and the BISA-IPEG Book Prize 2023. Apart from that, her writings have been published in several academic journals and popular media. She studied Political Science at Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University, from where she earned her PhD.
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