WAAT: “Enduring Incompletion: An Ethnography of Ambivalent Attachments to Unfinished Infrastructure in Tijuana, Mexico” by Dr. Furlong
Weekday Afternoon Anthropology Talks (WAAT)
November 4, 2024
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
Location
BSB 2105
Calendar
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We are resuming our Weekday Afternoon Anthropology Talks (WAATs) next MONDAY Nov 4th at 12pm-1pm Dr. Matt Furlong from the Department of Anthropology in UIC will present:
Title: Enduring Incompletion: An Ethnography of Ambivalent Attachments to Unfinished Infrastructure in Tijuana, Mexico.
Where: Behavioral Sciences Building (BSB) Room 2105
When: Nov 4th at 12pm-1pm
About: This talk explores ambivalence in relation to incomplete public housing infrastructure in Tijuana, Mexico, focusing on the perspectives of residents, government officials, and private developers. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with construction firms like Ruba, government bodies such as Infonavit (Latin America’s largest mortgage originator by volume), and local Tijuana legal aid societies, I examine how conflicting emotions and motives—what I call 'materialist ambivalence'—shape people’s attachments to unfinished infrastructure and their attitudes toward other public housing stakeholders. The talk begins with a case study of Natura, a major unfinished public housing development in Tijuana, and moves to analyze how the city legally determines housing infrastructure’s completeness through the process of ‘municipalization.’ Finally, I examine how mortgage debtors in Tijuana’s largest legal aid society during the 2010s leveraged the incompleteness of both physical infrastructure and mortgage contracts to resist eviction. By bringing together different attachments to unfinished housing infrastructure, this talk makes two theoretical contributions to the study of 'affective infrastructure,' defined as the relations between human affect and physical infrastructure. First, it expands the anthropological understanding of ‘ambivalence’ beyond the common framing of hope and uncertainty by attending to other mixtures of positive and negative affects, such as nostalgia and culpability, or indignance and shame. Second, it broadens the scope of ambivalent relations to infrastructure as studied by ethnographers by including elite actors in government and industry, in addition to working- and middle-class publics.
Date posted
Oct 30, 2024
Date updated
Oct 30, 2024