Caring Through Electricity: Transforming Political Subjectivities in Northern Pakistan
My PhD project deals with questions of access to infrastructure, energy justice, and self-governance, based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Gilgit-Baltistan, Northern Pakistan. In a context of extreme load-shedding (electricity poverty) and political marginalisation, the project looks at the transformative role of energy sharing and community-owned hydro-powerplants. I relate changes in communal land ownership and rural political mobilisation to climate change and transnational infrastructural projects. Combining the sensory experience of electricity shortage with state and non-state energy development and forms of dispossessions, I investigate the contingencies and inequalities of contemporary energy politics. Through this, the thesis shows how infrastructural practices of caring through electricity shape social organisation and subjectivities/identities.