Thursday, March 25, 2021 4:30 PM to 7:00 PM EDT
Zoom Virtual Event
Join us virtually at the Cultural Studies Colloquium, a forum for interdisciplinary research, for two talks by our very esteemed colleagues from, respectively, Sociology and Anthropology and Film and Media Studies, Professor Rashmi Sadana and Professor Hatim El-Hibri. Their individual talks are titled "The Mobilities of the Delhi Metro" and "Another Future Was Possible: The Before/After Image and Beirut's Postwar Construction."
Below is a summary of their talks:
The Mobilities Of The Delhi Metro
Rashmi Sadana, Associate Professor,
George Mason University
"The arrival of the Delhi Metro – an ultra-modern urban rail system and South Asia’s first major, multi-line metro – has become a touchstone for discussions of urban development, gendered social mobility, and India’s increasingly aspirational culture. A street-level ethnographic view of the city, this research captures the contradictions of a capital-intensive mega project that seeks to equalize how people of diverse social classes and backgrounds get around. This talk will focus on the different kinds of mobilities of the Metro, including transport, gender, class and caste, and explore the relationship between the Metro as symbol, material infrastructure, and new form of sociality in the city."
Another Future Was Possible: The Before/After Image and Beirut's Postwar Construction
Hatim El-Hibri, Assistant Professor,
George Mason University
"What role do images play in remaking cities after conflict? And what can the history of urban space tell us about infrastructure? This talk examines the case of Beirut after its civil war (1975-1990), and shows how the creation of a new economic regime depended on media. Imaging technologies played a key role in urban design and in managing public perception of the private real estate company that was given control of the city center, but also in securing new links to global finance. By problematizing the work of images of before/after, which contrast damaged buildings with a future-perfect, it becomes possible to understand how other, more equitable urban futures are foreclosed."
