Abstract
In this paper I discuss our current research-in-progress engaging marginalised off-grid coastal communities in Indonesia, Participation of Women in Renewable Energy (POWERE, UKRI Ayrton Challenge). With a team of researchers, we develop anthropological work on infrastructure as with enquiries on the aesthetic and sensorial experiences of lived environments, and a means to ground identities and varied expectations. Such studies have demonstrated how modernist visions of infrastructure—pipelines, turbines, reactors, pylons and so forth—evoke ideals of inclusion and integration, yet also serve partial and vested interests, create regimes of control, and segregate lives. The phenomena can create contested engagements, claims and demands on space, flows and rights. Infrastructure, then, is not necessarily a totalising public good but has differential effects and relations with varied communities. Parallel studies on how particular groups can be debilitated and/or enabled in daily life through intersections of their gender, race/ethnicity, class etc. Combining conceptual dimensions of the intersectional and infrastructural enables an inter-structural lens. For instance, where electricity is precarious, finances are minimal, and entrepreneurial ambitions are strong, women can be motivated to transition to renewable energy if a viable option is presented to them, even in patriarchal contexts. Contributing to energy solutions, they can shift patriarchal norms that otherwise exclude them. An inter-structural lens enables us to tend to contextual and nuanced analyses to fully understand how infrastructure is differentially experienced and engaged by social actors in any setting. The research considers the social, gendered, economic and environmental implications of floating solar co-developments among off-grid coastal communities in a remote region of Indonesia.
Bio
Raminder Kaur is an anthropologist and an interdisciplinary scholar based at the University of Manchester. She was previously a Professor of Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the University of Sussex. She was formerly Chair of the World Council of Anthropological Associations Ethics Taskforce (2013-2016).
Professor Kaur has conducted fieldwork in India, Pakistan, Indonesia and Britain, and often channels her research into creative projects in theatre, film, and other artforms.
To place film at the heart of discussions on ethnography, she initiated The Film Symposium and proposed a new framework for a Fifth cinema. Professor Kaur is a member of the RAI Film Committee, and a Fellow of “The royal society for the encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce” to enrich society through ideas and action. Professor Kaur has published agenda-setting articles such as combining ethnography with graphic narratives. She is the founder and co-producer of the international scriptwriting competition and RAFTA festival from 2022 with Sohaya Visions and Mukul & Ghetto Tigers.
Professor Kaur is the author of Performative Politics and the Cultures of Hinduism and Atomic Mumbai (Anthem Press 2005), co-author of Adventure Comics and Youth Cultures in India, and Diaspora and Hybridity (Routledge India, 2018), and the author of Atomic Mumbai: Living with the Radiance of a Thousand Suns (Routledge) and Kudankulam: The Story of an Indon-Russian Nuclear Power Plant (Oxford University Press, 2020).