Resilience and Maintenance: Energy and Urban Infrastructures
Sunday, December 10, 2023
10:15 – 11:30 AM
Location: Bin Jelmood House, Covered Courtyard, Msheireb Museums
This panel examines urban resilience and infrastructure maintenance in the context of energy production and consumption. We will discuss the sociotechnical constitution of resilience and the crucial (though often neglected) work of infrastructure maintenance and repair.
Anto Mohsin (Moderator)
Anto Mohsin is an Assistant Professor in Residence in the Liberal Arts Program at Northwestern University in Qatar and an affiliated faculty member of the Science in Human Culture Program at Northwestern’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. He is an interdisciplinary scholar of infrastructure, energy, and the environment specializing in Indonesia in the twentieth century with a broader interest in Southeast Asia. He has researched and published different science and technology studies (STS) topics. His peer-reviewed articles have appeared in several journals, including Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia; East Asian Science; Technology and Society: An International Journal; and Arcadia, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal for short, engaging environmental histories. He has also published a chapter on community resilience in the wake of a long-running energy-related disaster in the edited volume The Sociotechnical Constitution of Resilience (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and on electric infrastructure development in Indonesia’s borderlands in the anthology Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia (University of Hawaii, 2022). His first book, Electrifying Indonesia: Technology and Social Justice in National Development, published by the University of Wisconsin Press, comes out in December 2023. Prior to joining Northwestern Qatar, he held a Henry Luce Postdoctoral Fellowship in Asian Environmental Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He received his doctoral degree in science and technology studies (STS) from Cornell University.
Sulfikar Amir
Sulfikar Amir is an Associate Professor of Science, Technology,and Society (STS) at the School of Social Sciences, and Director of NTU Institute of Science and Technology for Humanity (NISTH) at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research interests primarily focus on examining institutional, political, and epistemological dimensions of scientific knowledge and technological systems. He has conducted research on technological nationalism, development and globalisation, nuclear politics, risk and disaster, design studies, city and infrastructure, and resilience. He is the author of The Technological State in Indonesia: the Co-constitution of High Technology and Authoritarian Politics (Routledge, 2012), and the editor of The Sociotechnical Constitution of Resilience: A New Perspective on Governing Risk and Disaster (Palgrave, 2018).
Mona Harb
Mona Harb is tenured Professor of urban studies and politics at the American University of Beirut where she is also co-founder and research lead at the Beirut Urban Lab. Her current research investigates urban governance, city-making and urban commons in predatory states, in contexts of crises and disasters. She is the author of Le Hezbollah à Beirut: de la banlieue à la ville, co-author of Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shi’i South Beirut (with Lara Deeb), co-editor of Local Governments and Public Goods: Assessing Decentralization in the Arab World, and co-editor of Refugees as City-Makers, and of more than eighty journal articles, book chapters, and other publications. She serves on the editorial boards of Environment and Planning C, CSSAME and IJMES. She is also the coordinator of the AUB graduate programs in Urban Planning, Policy and Design, and was previously Associate Dean of her faculty, and Chairperson of the department of Architecture and Design. She provides professional advice on urban development issues for several international organizations (ESCWA, WB, EU, UNDP).
Cecilia Ibarra
Cecilia Ibarra is the Faculty of Government and adjunct professor at the Faculty of Physical and Mathematical Sciences of the University of Chile. Her research focuses on climate governance, the role of science, and processes of technological change from a historical perspective. She is an associated researcher at the Centre for Climate Science and Resilience, CR2.
Veronica Jacome
Veronica Jacome is an Assistant Professor of Energy Geography at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA, USA. Prior to joining Temple University, Dr. Jacome was a University of California’s President Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Santa Barbara working with environmental sociologist David Pellow, and a Chateaubriand Fellow at Mines ParisTech in the Center for Advanced Mathematics. Her research covers energy systems with a focus on electric power grids evaluation and history, the political economy of energy development, theories of Global South, and Science and Technology Studies.