The Hydropower Tower: An Infrastructural Biography of Transmission and Transformation in Dolakha, Nepal
- Sara ShneidermanDetails
30 August 2026/१४ भदौ २०८३ (आइतबार, दिउँसो ३ बजे)
Research Seminar Series
The Hydropower Tower: An Infrastructural Biography of Transmission and Transformation in Dolakha, Nepal
Sara Shneiderman, University of British Colombia, Canada
About the talk:
How does hydropower development reshape landscapes and livelihoods far away from the flow of water itself? Much critical scholarship has addressed riverine environmental impacts and the often devastating outcomes of dam-related displacement for downstream communities, as well as the mobilization of resistance to these developments. This presentation builds on such work to ask how the transnational flows of materiality, expertise, and capital that accompany large-scale infrastructural development can transform rural communities situated along lines of hydropower transmission at a distance from power-generating rivers and dams themselves.
I explore these questions in the context of a Thangmi community in Dolakha, Nepal, whose fields and forests have over the last decade become host to lines of transmission from multiple hydropower projects that originate near the northern border between Nepal and China’s Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR). Drawing upon a chapter of my ethnography in process, "Restructuring Life: Conflict, Disaster, and Transformation in Nepal," this photographically-illustrated presentation develops an infrastructural biography of the hydropower tower to explore how community members living along lines of transmission conceptualize their own geographical and social location in relation to the ongoing transformations that hydropower development brings.
About the Speaker:
Sara Shneiderman is Ivan Head South-North IDRC Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and School of Public Policy & Global Affairs at UBC. She is a sociocultural anthropologist who has worked across South Asia and the Himalayas in Nepal, India, and the Tibetan Autonomous Region of China for over 30 years, with emergent research interests in British Columbia, Canada. Broadly speaking, her work explores how social transformation is shaped by dynamics of citizenship and belonging (in relation to Indigenous, ethnic, religious and gender identities); cross-border mobility; conflict and political mobilization; territory and land use; development discourses and practices; and disaster aftermath and preparedness. Her books include the ethnography Rituals of Ethnicity: Thangmi Identities Between Nepal and India (2015, University of Pennsylvania Press) and two edited volumes: Darjeeling Reconsidered: Histories, Politics, Environments (2018, Oxford University Press), and Infrastructures of Democracy: Politics and Processes of Road Building in Rural Nepal (2026, Martin Chautari). Much of her work is conducted in transdisciplinary, international collaboration, leading to recent co-authored journal articles in Current Anthropology and World Development, among others, with a focus on the affective and political dynamics of post-earthquake reconstruction disaster risk governance in Nepal. Her long-standing commitment to community engagement and public scholarship is currently invested in co-leading the UBC Himalaya Program and UBC Disaster Resilience Research Network.