From Mumbai city, with its violent history of human accidents along its commuter lines, Dr Nirali Joshi presents insights on the larger social structuring and institutional politics of accident and emergency care work. Her talk unpacks the historico-geographical embeddedness of the human accident as an ‘inconvenient’ externality of railway infrastructure; its political invisibility as accomplished through techno-legal classification, commercial logics, criminalisation and fragmented/diffused institutional responsibility; and its presence within postcolonial railway space at the margins of state and societal action.
Alongside this, she draws from an ethnography of everyday accident-work among frontline state agents involved in its different tasks and stages – emergency response, medical care, investigation and case closure, and disposal of remains. In the corporeality of severed bodies; navigation between hostile tracks and crowded hospitals; pragmatic and ethical manoeuvres for accomplishing medical and death care amidst severe resource deficits; and in the moral imperatives of restoring social and legal personhood to the injured and deceased – accident-work engages its attendants in visceral and intimate encounters, subjectivities, ethical dissonances, dependencies and mutuality around human loss. Revealed through this methodological expansion is a discernible, albeit tensioned, continuum of institutional efforts, socio-labours and inter-personal relations through which situated care and embodied guardianship get produced within and by the state.
Together, the talk illuminates the modes through which the state makes itself elusive as well as present in tending to the human accident’s moral and material predicament, the differential burdens of its care, and what it tells us about the relationship between risk, infrastructure and the state as produced at the intersection of urban, legal and political geographies.
Biography:
Nirali Joshi is an ESRC postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, University of Sheffield. As a human geographer, her key areas of work and interest lie 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.