Jon Schubert (Basel): Authoritarian Planning: Speculation, spectral infrastructure, and extractivism in Angola
| Dates: | 4 November 2024 |
|---|
| Times: | 15:00 - 17:00 |
|---|
| What is it: | Seminar |
|---|
| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
|---|
| Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers, Current University students |
|---|
| Speaker: | Jon Schubert |
|---|
|
In a moment of pervasive economic crisis, when any economic rationalities that may have justified investments in big infrastructure appear increasingly like pure fantasy, what visions of resource-dependent development are driving urbanisation? And how do such urban developments index configurations of power and capital? This paper is based on a three-year research project on infrastructures and crisis in and around Lobito, Angola. Building from ongoing reflections about speculative engagement with infrastructures I seek to show how a logic of speculation is replicated across scales, conditioning urban development and the possibilities of economic diversification in Angola. Angolans across social classes track the oil prices almost like a divine phenomenon that directly shapes the conditions for their individual and collective plans of social advancement, which conveniently obscures how the oil-dependent economy is produced. Rather than a question of lacking capacities or planning failure, it shows how oil-dependency and infrastructural speculation are a fundamental and deliberate instrument of regime maintenance, that produces its own logics and aesthetics.
Speaker
Jon Schubert
Organisation: University of Basel
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
Hanson Room
Humanities Bridgeford Street
Manchester
