Below is a list of teaching resources that I drew up as a supplement to my forthcoming (2023, 55(2)) Antipode article, “Class, Caste, Gender, and the Materiality of Cement Houses in India“. It’s part of new initiative started by antipodeonline.org, called The Critical Classroom, that aims “to create a commons resource of radical geography teaching suggestions and pedagogical reflections built around published Antipode content, and built by the authors of that content”. It seeks to “address the importance of teaching, and platform the space of the classroom, as integral components of the radical geographical project”. Here’s the link to the page, ‘“Class, Caste, Gender, and the Materiality of Cement Houses in India” by Siddharth Menon‘.

Forthcoming in Antipode 55(2) in March 2023, and available online now, my open access article, “Class, Caste, Gender, and the Materiality of Cement Houses in India”, can be taught in graduate and mid-/higher-level undergraduate courses, like Urban Studies, Urban Political Ecology, Infrastructure Studies, and Development Studies, across disciplines like Geography, Anthropology, Urban Planning, Environmental Design, and Science and Technology Studies (STS).

The article should push students to discuss and debate the myriad ways in which the mundane materialities of everyday infrastructures shape, structure, and suture our complex and interconnected social worlds. It should instigate conversations about the hidden relations of labour that underpin the materiality of infrastructures.

• How would these relations change when there is a shift in materiality? Would such a shift lead to more equitable relations of work? Who gains and who loses when there are shifts in materiality?

Discussions and debates around these questions, among others, will foreground the false distinction between the “social” and the “material”, thus conceptually moving us towards an understanding of the “socio-material”.

RESOURCES

“Materials” – This essay by Penny Harvey from “The Infrastructure Toolbox” in Fieldsights provides a succinct introduction to the agency and power of everyday materials in constituting our social world.

“Public Infrastructures/Infrastructural Publics” – This collection of essays edited by Stephen J. Collier, James Christopher Mizes, and Antina Von Schnitzler for Limn brings together striking examples from around the world of how infrastructures are configured by, and in turn configure, different people or “publics” they’re meant to service.

“Labor” – This collection of essays edited by Galen Murton for Roadsides uses images, videos, and paintings to reveal the hidden social relations of work that animate contemporary infrastructure development projects from different parts of the world.

“Decolonizing Infrastructure” – This podcast by Malini Ranganathan for Edge Effects introduces listeners to the ways in which access to water infrastructures in India and the US are closely linked to social identities of class, caste, race, and gender.

“Not Just Roads” – This ethnographic documentary by Nitin Bathla and Klearjos Eduardo Papanicolaou about a highway construction project outside New Delhi, India foregrounds the many human and non-human lives that are implicated in large-scale infrastructure development projects.