HYDERABAD, INDIA

Philippe Messier is investigating how roads and wireless communication technologies represent and partake in the new Telangana State's visions of connectivity and mobility, in southern India. He will build on his previous work with urban migrant Vadderas, a marginalized group of stonecutters and farmers who produce granite stone blocks that are used to build information technology (IT) offices and roads in Hyderabad to diversify their livelihood. Messier will examine through collaborative videos how young Vadderas are cracking the codes of wireless internet with their cellphones while they continue to produce stone blocks for the new roads and highways that are being built for the ever-expanding Hyderabad's suburbs.

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Selected publications

Messier, P. (2024). Between Smart Images and Fast Trucks: Digital Surveillance and Obscured Labour in Hyderabad, India. The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, DOI: 10.1080/14442213.2024.2324826

Messier, P. (2024). Introduction—Building Infrastructural Lives: Mobile and Creative Livelihoods in India and Vietnam. The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, DOI: 10.1080/14442213.2024.2318236

Messier, P. (2022). Citoyenneté programmée au Télangana. Infrastructures des TIC et rituels d’un nouvel État. Anthropologie et Sociétés, 46(1), 67-89.

Messier, P. (2020). Digital Futures: Aesthetic Stability and the Fictional Infrastructure of Hyderabad's Special Economic Zones. Verge: Studies in Global Asias, 6(2), 139-166.

Messier, P. (2019). Cameras at Work: Dusty Lenses and Processed Videos in the Quarries of Hyderabad. Visual Anthropology, 32(3-4), 287-308.



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Zanskar, India