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- Trovalla, Erik, et al.
(författare)
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Infrastructure as a divination tool : Whispers from the grids in a Nigerian city
- 2015
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Ingår i: City. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1360-4813 .- 1470-3629. ; 19:2-3, s. 332-343
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In the Nigerian city of Jos, everyday life is shaped by interlacing rhythms of disconnection and reconnection. Petrol, electricity, water, etc., come and go, and in order to gain access inhabitants constantly try to discern the logics behind these fluctuations. However, the unpredictable infrastructure also becomes a system of signs through which residents try to understand issues beyond those immediately at hand. Signals, pipes, wires and roads link individuals to larger wholes, and the character of these connections informs and transforms experiences of the social world. Not only an object, but also a means of divination, infrastructure is a harbinger of truths about elusive and mutable social entities?neighbourhoods, cities, nations and beyond. Through the materiality of infrastructure, its flows and glitches carefully read by the inhabitants, an increasingly disjointed city emerges. Through new experiences of differentiated modes of connectedness?of no longer sharing the same roads, pipes, electricity lines, etc.?narratives are formed around lost common trajectories. By focusing on how wires, pipes and roads are turned into a divination system?how the inhabitants of Jos try to divine the city's infrastructure and possible ways forward, as well as how they try, through the infrastructure, to predict a city, a nation and a world beyond?this paper strives to find ways to grasp a thickness of urban becomings?a cityness on the move according to its own unique logic.
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| 2. |
- Trovalla, Ulrika, 1972-
(författare)
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Competing prayers : the making of a Nigerian urban landscape
- 2015
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Ingår i: Anthropology Southern Africa. - : Informa UK Limited. - 2332-3256 .- 2332-3264. ; 38:3-4, s. 302-313
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- While Christians are seen as aspiring to make the Nigerian city of Jos into a Christian city, Muslims are believed to be trying to turn Jos into a Muslim city. There is a struggle over the urban landscape that is being fought most significantly on the ground through attempts to erase the presence of the other — the traces of their activities — at the same time as asserting one's own. Jos's urban landscape has materialised as an intrinsic part of the city's conflicts. Embedded in it are people's fears, wishes and prayers for the future, and violence is more often directed at these and the landscape itself — the body of the city — than at people's physical bodies. Fought with tools such as burning down buildings, renaming areas, praying in the street, using loudspeakers, clothes, roadblocks and signboards, it is a battle over what is present and absent in the urban scenery.
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| 3. |
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| 4. |
- Trovalla, Ulrika, 1972-, et al.
(författare)
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Infrastructure turned suprastructure : unpredictable materialities and visions of a Nigerian nation
- 2015
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Ingår i: Journal of material culture. - : SAGE Publications. - 1359-1835 .- 1460-3586. ; 20:1, s. 43-57
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- There are signs hidden in the infrastructure. In the Nigerian city of Jos, the unpredictable availability of power, fuel, water, etc. becomes a vehicle of meaning. In many settings across the globe, infrastructure is often made invisible, and the centre stage that it takes in everyday life remains unrecognized. In Jos, however, as in many African cities, the constant need to predict its flows contradicts the prefix infra (below); rather than being hidden beneath the realm of experience it is brought to the surface as a puzzle to be figured out. These explorations in turn come to reveal matters beyond the infrastructure itself. Just as diviners infer the state of the world from the stones they have thrown, reading significance out of the seeming randomness of matter, the infrastructure turns intricate questions into tangible clues. It becomes a suprastructure - a divination tool giving clues about the past, present and future of the Nigerian nation.
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| 5. |
- Trovalla, Ulrika, 1972-, et al.
(författare)
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Movement as Mediation : Envisioning a Divided Nigerian City
- 2014
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Ingår i: Nordic Journal of African Studies. - Helsinki : Nordic Association of African Studies. - 1235-4481 .- 1459-9465. ; 23:2, s. 66-82
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Since its establishment in the beginning of the twentieth century, the inhabitants of the ethnically and religiously diverse Nigerian city of Jos have inhabited very different places and travelled along opposite trails – patterns that in recent years, with an escalation of violence, have gained new dimensions. By bringing people’s movements into focus, this article highlights how movement comes in different ways to mediate between people and a city in flux. Brought to light is how movement in several different modalities – fast, slow, in total arrest; clothed in Christian or Muslim attires; by car, on foot, or on horseback; assertive or explorative, in triumph as well as in fear – by mediating between people and the city, brings forth a metaphysical landscape that otherwise is hard to get hold of. In this vein, movement as a medium has become a form of ‘social envisioning’ – a tool for understanding and foretelling the city.
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| 6. |
- Trovalla, Ulrika, 1972-
(författare)
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Predicting an Uncertain Infrastructure
- 2013
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Ingår i: Embassy Newsletter – Economic and Promotional News from West Africa. - Abuja : Embassy of Sweden Abuja. ; winter
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Tidskriftsartikel (populärvet., debatt m.m.)abstract
- Recently, our research project ‘Infrastructure as Divination: Urban Life in the Postcolony’ received funding from the Swedish Research Council. This three-year project explores the often overlooked qualitative aspects of infrastructure, and focuses on how the inhabitants in the Nigerian city of Jos try to predict the comings and goings of the infrastructure, as well as how they, through the infrastructure itself, try to predict the future of the city and the nation. Hence the word ‘divination’ in the title, which means ‘prediction,’ ‘prophecy,’ or ‘forecast.’
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| 7. |
- Trovalla, Ulrika, 1972-, et al.
(författare)
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Suprastructure : A photo exhibition
- 2013
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Bok (populärvet., debatt m.m.)abstract
- The photo exhibition ’Suprastructure’ was first displayed at Museum Gustavianum in Uppsala between 17 November 2012 and 5 March 2013. It was digitally published in March 2013 as part of a research project entitled ‘Infrastructure as Divination: Urban Life in the Postcolony,’ financed by the Swedish Research Council. The scholars behind the exhibition, Ulrika and Erik Trovalla, are researchers in cultural anthropology and ethnology. They are based at the Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala, and Uppsala University. Drawing on their photographs from the million city Jos in central Nigeria, they here give a glimpse of their research into the meanings of infrastructure in everyday life.
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