ICS Seminar - Robert Foster

Becoming Obsolete: Infrastructural Time and the Other in a Papua New Guinea Telecommunications Network

Event Details:

Date and Time: Thursday, 6 October, 11:30am - 1:00pm

Location: Building EB, Ground Level, Room 38 (EB.G.38), Parramatta South Campus, Western Sydney University

Presenter: Robert Foster (University of Rochester)

Abstract

This talk considers the “temporality of infrastructure” (Gupta 2018) by tracing changes in the spatiotemporal configuration of a telecommunications network in Papua New Guinea (PNG). It describes the arrival of Digicel Group Ltd., a privately owned foreign company, in response to the PNG government’s 2005 decision to allow competition in the market for mobile communications. It demonstrates how between the years 2007 and 2017, obsolescence was produced through shifts in media infrastructure that opened up a digital divide between urban and rural areas, effectively denying the developmental promise of national coevalness (Anderson 1983, Fabian 1983).

Biographies

Presenter: Robert J. Foster is Professor of Anthropology and Visual and Cultural Studies, and Richard L. Turner Professor of Humanities at the University of Rochester and an Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University. His research interests include globalisation, corporations, commercial media, and material culture. He is the author of Social Reproduction and History in Melanesia: Mortuary Ritual, Gift Exchange, and Custom in the Tanga Islands (Cambridge, 1995); Materializing the Nation: Commodities, Consumption and Media in Papua New Guinea (Indiana, 2002); and Coca-Globalization: Following Soft Drinks from New York to New Guinea (Palgrave, 2008). He is co-editor with Heather Horst of The Moral Economy of Mobile Phones: Pacific Islands Perspectives (ANU, 2018).

Chair: Gay Hawkins is Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University.

Discussant: Malini Sur is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences and the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University.

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