ILJ Colloquium Fall 2019
Infrastructure, Rights and Regulation
Convened by Benedict Kingsbury and Sally Engle Merry
Speaker: Andrea Muehlebach, University of Toronto
Topic: Responding to Water Infrastructure Financialization: From Above and Below
Location: Furman Hall 120
About Prof. Muehlebach
Prof. Muehlebach’s research explores the politics and ethics of economic life. Her first book, The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy, explored neoliberalism’s moral authoritarianism through the privatization of social welfare in Northern Italy. Her second book tracks the politics of water privatization, financialization, and re-municipalization in austerity-era Europe. She asks how new forms of political imagination and environmental citizenship take root as citizens and municipalities have attempted to reclaim ownership over water. This work aims to contribute to an anthropology of resource politics and democratic citizenship at a moment where the interlocking crises of capitalism, democracy, and the environment have become more apparent than ever before. Taken together, Prof. Muehlebach’s work seeks to grasp the every-day life of processes of neoliberalization and to identify moments ranging from subsumption to refusal. In addition, she is an elected Member of the Executive Board for the Society for Cultural Anthropology, as well as on the Editorial boards of Cultural Anthropology, the Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, and Quaderni di Teoria Sociale.