Thinking about Dust in the Periphery

Neha Gupta, PhD

It has been over a month since I moved to Mumbai and started fieldwork for the Regional Futures Project. In connection to the project, we try to make sense of Information and Communication Technology enabled urbanism and the integration of digital technologies in planning processes. Initially, undertaking research in Mumbai was a challenging arena. The concepts were familiar; the city was not. Dubbed the “maximum city”, wrought by contemporary processes of neo-liberal urbanization, Mumbai presents a complex urbanity that is simultaneously fascinating and frightening, brutal and sublime, wretched and wonderful; an urban milieu that is as much a developed modern Asian megacity as a landscape of poverty. Located at the centre of these conflicts, precipitated by the extraordinary scale of modernization and urbanization, Mumbai embodies a pace, rhythm, and tone that can devalue human experiences. The social, material, and aural landscapes of the city are all intense, high-decibel, and saturated. Here human impulses and urban pressures continuously jostle to coproduce a people and a space characterized by resilience. This urbanity of excess, struggle, and isolation does not trigger rustic or pastoral anxieties in me; I, too, come from a metro city, after all. However, this grand scale of urbanization is compelling because it has resulted in a city that is perpetually growing and engulfing its peripheries: an unfinished project of industrial modernity. These vanishing peripheries – subsumed by the megalopolis -- are the focus of the inquiry.

Through this act of making ‘urban’, the peripheries are dissolving into dust, quite literally, as land is pulverized into fine particles of matter and metaphorically as urbanization ‘turns to dust’ virtually anything standing in its way. Thinking about dust as peripheralization can be layered with the notion of dirt as abjection and othering (Douglas, 2002; Pickering & Wiseman, 2019) to produce a rich understanding of the processes of (re)making boundaries. Perhaps dust and dirt can both be discussed as an entangled dynamic of the periphery, both spatialized as a site of distinction, apartness, and marginalization. In this characterization, dust is not merely conspicuous, pervasive, and material but imbued with social meaning. It becomes a potent metaphor with which to think about urbanization. As I travel to Bhiwandi (the location we are studying in the project) from Mumbai, the landscape completely transforms beyond Thane as I transit from the Eastern Express Highway to the National Highways. It unfolds as a site of ongoing, real-time transition and human intervention -- as people construct, repair, and destroy – where the local ecologies vaporize into dust. Here, dust is the promise of coming urbanity.

To me, the notion of dust presents a theoretical opportunity that can be leveraged to push the ontological premise of sociomaterial approaches. Sociomaterialism conceptualizes the social and the material as entangled, where bodies, spaces, environments, and objects are not distinct units but relational enactments that emerge from and within the boundaries of these relationships. Thinking with and through dust is grounded in sociological miniaturism that proposes the examination of large social systems from the smallest bits of life. Such an approach can help theorise the urban periphery using the most fundamental unit of its articulation.

Within this framework, dust that moves between visibility and invisibility, concentrating and dissipating, helps characterize a temporal linkage between the urban and its periphery. Intrinsic to each process of renewal, dust is the promise of the future that seeps into the present. Dust dissipates as the process of urbanization is ‘complete’, only to emerge at another site.

Further, dust as a conceptual tool can also advance the understanding of the informational politics at play in the peripheries. If one is to accept the premise that “information is a difference that moves” (Jordan, 2015), in that information is relational, non-static, and always already embedded in the social and significatory systems that allow an exchange to happen, the presence of dust within statist informational regimes – sitting on paper archives that are slowly devolving into dust – is information. It communicates time lapses. Thus, in the context of archives, dust is time visibilized. A dust build-up can be a measure of the slowness of these paper regimes that allow dust to gather. Against this backdrop, digitalization presents the promise of speed and efficiency to counter the immobility of paper. Digitalization is doing away with dusty paper archives in the interest of creating sanitary, impersonal, and mediated encounters with the state. For a researcher, then, thinking with dust can be a powerful tool to conceptualize differences (the transitioning periphery) and difference as information (archives that map these transitions).

As such, dust is a powerful motif in characterizing a relational or ‘becoming’ ontology of the peripheries and its information infra/structures. It helps unpack the entanglements that materialize the periphery as a perpetually transforming site. It resides within its structures and informs how information moves within them. What are the possible challenges that confront the researcher adopting this relational epistemology? What does it mean to think with dust? Barad (2007) suggests that practices of knowing cannot be separated from practices of being, that is, knowledge cannot be separated from the performative practices of how knowledge is achieved and enacted. The subject and object are not separate but co-constitutive. Thinking with dust, then, entails embodied encounters with dust on the highway and in the archives. This also means not filtering these experiences through the use of face masks, for instance, that would impede proximity to the research context. It would mean understanding socialities configured around dust and the everyday practices of people situated within these dusty environments. I do not for once underestimate the challenges of using this sociomaterial approach. It is difficult to keep the material within the storyline as it relates to practices. However, an epistemology of dust is best suited to capture the rapidly transforming urban peripheries.

References

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2007.

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Repr, Routledge, 2002.

Jordan, Tim. Information Politics. Pluto Press, 2015.

Pickering, Lucy, and Phillippa Wiseman. “Dirty Scholarship and Dirty Lives: Explorations in Bodies and Belonging.” The Sociological Review, vol. 67, no. 4, July 2019, pp. 746–65. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1177/0038026119854244.