Chakad OjaniLärare
Om mig
Jag är en socialantropolog med en specialisering på relationen mellan infrastruktur och miljö. Mina forskningsintressen kretsar främst kring de socio-politiska processer som infrastrukturer både möjliggör och förhindrar. Jag arbetar för närvarande med ett bokprojekt om dimma som en alternativ vattenresurs i Peru samt en serie artiklar om rymdinfrastrukturer i Sverige.
Forskning
Ecology of capture
My doctoral thesis drew on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork on material engagements with fog at the margins of the Peruvian city of Lima and coastal areas further south. My aim was to examine the politics of contemporary urban and environmental relations in these places of aridity, where glacial retreat and rapid urban expansion are increasingly raising concerns about water scarcity and the gradual disappearance of urban fog oasis ecosystems.
In this context, a steady inflow of coastal fog has recently been re-apprehended as a potential water source. Based on fieldwork undertaken with a Peruvian NGO and a network of fog oasis conservationists in Lima, my study showed how these collectives became enmeshed with Peru’s long-standing history of informal urbanisation. Of particular concern was how their different modes of engaging fog were directly at odds with one another. The NGO was trying to tap into ground-touching clouds as a water source for the urban poor, meaning that their activities aimed to render Lima’s hilly surrounds habitable for squatters. In contrast, conservationists sought to capture fog for the purpose of making the very same areas uninhabitable for human dwelling.
My thesis demonstrated how, in setting out to capture fog so as to attain their own respective goals, actors became ensnared in one another’s activities, demands, and expectations. Inspired by the language of capture and entrapment variously invoked by the collectives in question, these relations were described as being constitutive of an ecology of capture: an emergent web of relationships held together by conflicting aims and expectations, the possibilities and limits of fog capture, and the material qualities of fog itself.
Utvalda Publikationer
(In press) Smallness and small-device heuristics: Scaling fog catchers down and up in Lima, Peru. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale 31 (2).
2023 The promise of fog capture: Ground-touching clouds as a material (im)possibility in Peru. Cultural Anthropology 38 (2): 225-250.
2022. Water in atmospheric suspension: Contact zones between ethnography and speculative realism. Social Analysis: The International Journal of Anthropology 66 (2): 62-84.
2022. Speculative relations in Lima: Encounters with the limits of fog capture and ethnography. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 12 (2): 468-481.
2022. Displacing (in)formality: Endangered species, endangered city, and unstable grounds of comparison. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 28 (2): 516-536.
2022. Experimenting with fog: Environmental infrastructures, infrastructuring environments, and the infrastructure of infrastructure. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space (ahead of print): 1-18.
2022. Exploring the extra-planetary: Social studies of outer space. Anthropology Today 38 (3): 9-12. (Co-authored with P. Timko, K. Korpershoek, and A. Szolucha.)
2021. Ecology of capture: Creating land titles out of thin air in coastal Peru. Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology (ahead of print): 1-20.
2021. The (ontological) politics of fog capture in Lima, Peru. Anthropology Today 37 (1): 13-16.