The Department of Anthropology Seminar Series Presents:

(Il)legality, Emergency, and the Struggle over the Commons: Water Politics in Campania

Andrea Muehlebach

University of Toronto

Tuesday, October 25, 2016

3:30-5:00PM

Room A404 AN Bourns Science Building

Dr. Muehlebach is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto and the author of The Moral Neoliberal. Welfare and Citizenship in Italy among numerous other publications. In this talk, she explores struggles around water as a private, public and common good in the Southern region of Campania, Italy. The talk outlines how water has become a vehicle for experiments in democracy and legality – indeed, for new forms of law-and-public-making – while also exploring how the state has met these experiments with new rounds of dispossession. By taking a look a battles over public water fountains, protesting mayors, and the refusal to pay bills, the talk asks how these publics attempt to prevail, in common, from within the context of austerity-ridden Italy.