When:
Monday, October 28, 2024
4:30 PM - 6:00 PM CT
Where: University Hall, Hagstrum 201, 1897 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60208 map it
Audience: Faculty/Staff - Public - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students
Cost: FREE
Contact:
Janet Hundrieser
(847) 491-3525
Group: Science in Human Culture Program - Klopsteg Lecture Series
Category: Lectures & Meetings
Speaker
Dean Chahim, Envoirnmental Studies, New York University
Title
Engineering Control: Inscription, Erasure, and the Politics of Knowledge in Mexico City’s Sewer System
Abstract
TBD
Biography
Dean Chahim (PhD, Stanford University) is an anthropologist whose research and teaching broadly trace the interactions between political power, engineering, and the urban environment. Previously trained as an environmental engineer, his work asks both how unjust environmental conditions are produced and sustained through engineering and how engineering practice might be reconfigured to challenge injustice and design for radically different futures. His current book project takes up these concerns through the case of Mexico City’s vast and deeply unequal flood control system. Drawing on both ethnographic and archival research, the book shows how engineering becomes a mode not of mitigating, but governing disasters: of maintaining rule over populations living in increasingly hazardous environments. This project has been funded by the American Council for Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Prior to NYU, he taught at the University of Texas at El Paso and was a Fellow in the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities at Princeton University.