[Themaintainers] Keeping Cities in Motion: Labours of Repair and Maintenance in South Asia

[Malini Sur]

Dear Colleagues,

We hope this finds you well. Nausheen Anwar and I are delighted to announce our special issue on urban repair and maintenance in South Asia, Review of Urban Affairs, Economic and Political Weekly. In this collection, Nikhil McKay Anand, Adeem Suhail, Nausheen and I foreground how the repairers and maintainers of Kolkata, Karachi, and Mumbai—including cargo-bicycle and construction machinery repairers, and waste removal and health workers—experience and contribute to the changing urban landscape. By paying close ethnographic attention to networks of labour, tutelage, and power, as well as to emerging sites of discontent and mistrust, we reveal the terms upon which new urban connections are being forged in South Asian cities.

Here are the links to the articles (O/A). 

Keeping Cities in Motion: Introduction
Nausheen Anwar and Malini Sur
https://www.epw.in/.../review.../keeping-cities-motion.html

Cultures of Repair: Cargo cycles and Kinship in Kolkata
Malini Sur
https://www.epw.in/.../review-urban.../cultures-repair.html

Ustaads, Shagirds, and the Drudgery and Virtuosity of Breakdowns and Repair in Karachi
Nausheen Anwar
https://www.epw.in/.../ustaads-shagirds-and-drudgery-and...

Infrastructural Ephemera and Public Health in Pakistan
Adeem Suhail
https://www.epw.in/.../infrastructural-ephemera-and...

After Breakdown: Invisibility and the Labour of Infrastructure Maintenance
Nikhil Anand
https://www.epw.in/.../review-urban.../after-breakdown.html.

Please do reach out to us with your thoughts and suggestions,

with every good wish for the year ahead,
Malini and Nausheen


Malini Sur | Deputy Director Engagement | Senior Lecturer Anthropology
Institute for Culture and Society | School of Social Sciences
Western Sydney University

2020 Publications
Borders and Time https://journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca/article/view/4398/579

Sounds of Trauma https://ojs.victoria.ac.nz/ce/article/view/6655.

Territorial Ironies: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10767-020-09360-w.

 Air & Post-Carbon Futures
https://www.academia.edu/44515263/Ambient_Air_Kolkatas_Bicycle_Politics_and_Postcarbon_Futures.

Climate Justice, Migration & Cities
https://tinyurl.com/y9zt7fse.