Speaker
Description
Through the figure of the stationmaster, this paper explores the complex embodiment of the system within a role/character; and how it helps us think relationally about the co-constitution of human agency and technicity in the production of infrastructure as technosocial worlds, as public good and as sites of care. With an empirical focus on the postcolonial railway in India, the paper combines archival and organizational analysis with ethnographic insights from participatory research with retired and in-service stationmasters in India to trace the creation of the stationmaster’s authority and public persona across colonial enterprise and post-colonial nationalist imperatives (when India’s publicly owned railways endured as the prime mode of affordable long-distance transport for all classes of its people). It further situates stationmastering within techno-social worlds of mobility through the lived realities of everyday and ‘actual’ station-master work as entailed in interfacing the demands and expectations between technology-state-people. In so doing, it advances theoretical and empirical work on affective, embodied and peopled infrastructure advanced in contemporary human geography; and brings it together with the rich body of ethnographic work on street-level bureaucracy within anthropology of the state.
Biography
Nirali Joshi is a human geographer with key areas of work and interest in anthropology of the state, legal and political geographies of public provisioning, and the socio-labours of everyday infrastructural worlds. Her current work has a strong empirical focus on the postcolonial Indian railway. From 2024 until 2026 she is a researcher on the RAILIMAGE project.
