The Possibility of Reproduction: Work, Settlement, and Life on Pakistan’s Urbani

Dr. Waqas Butt (University of Toronto), Discussant: Dr. Shreyashi Dasgupta

Friday 1st November, 3pm; Seminar Room 6, South Campus Teaching Hub

Like many cities in Pakistan, Lahore’s waste infrastructures depend upon the everyday labor performed by low- or noncaste (Dalit) groups. This form of labor—waste work—takes away and disposes waste materials from certain spaces and makes them present elsewhere. Moving waste materials as they do across urban landscapes, waste infrastructures are entangled with the spatial dynamics of uneven urbanization in Lahore. This paper traces such dynamics by detailing shifts in settlement, work, and life experienced by waste workers and their kin as they have migrated to Lahore’s urbanizing peripheries over the past several decades. Low- or noncaste groups in Punjab have historically been landless labor, working under a variety of coercive relations with landowning groups from upper-caste backgrounds, engaging in different kinds of agrarian work and being settled on the land owned by others. As they have settled on Lahore’s urbanizing peripheries, they have sought out opportunities for work, employment, and income in the city’s expanding waste infrastructures, which has reworked forms of settlement, work, and indebtedness across generations. Just as reproduction occurs at intergenerational and domestic scales, it unfolds also at the scale of workers’ bodies, where their lives and bodies are exhausted through laboring with waste materials. This paper thus argues that reproduction is a distributed process unfolding across multiple though distinct spatiotemporal scales—from the intergenerational and domestic to the collective and individual. In delineating such spatiotemporal scales, it highlights how forms of life built upon caste-based relations have not only been reproduced through their transformation in Lahore but also reveals the constitutive texture of uneven urbanization across Pakistan. 

Part of the Seminar Series “Critical Theory, Critical Practice” organised by the Power, Space, and Cultural Change Cluster, Department of Geography and Planning.