About this Event
What is the technical-chemical work that translates geological formations of oil into sociopolitical formations of human relations? I demonstrate how chemical engineering of petroleum products in refineries inscribes governmentality into them: where the chemical reworking of matter becomes a material means to manage the everyday life of consumers. Differing chemical materializations of petroleum products afford distinct forms of sociality, modes of everyday living, urban design, possibilities for illegality, and state-citizen relations. The talk illustrates how the different chemical makeup and physical characteristics given to fuels in refineries exert dissimilar influences on the social dynamics of their distribution, storage, and usage, leading to different state-citizen relations. My analysis foregrounds chemical infrastructures as an arena where material machinations and technoscientific processes participate in the production of everyday life and government.
Author Bio: Dr. Sarandha Jain is an anthropologist of the environment, the state, and material politics. Based on ethnographic and archival research in India, her scholarship focuses on how infrastructures of fluvial materials like oil or water shape political authority, everyday life, and state-citizen relations in India. She is completing a book manuscript, Fluvial Government, which analyzes how the energy regime of oil in India is built and contested, and the material, political, and social entanglements that shape this process.
Picture: oil refinery process flow diagram
Source: wikimedia commons
Event venue & nearby stays
University College London, Common Ground, Room G11, Ground Floor, South Wing, Gower Street, London, United Kingdom
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