Making a ‘Hydropower Nation’: Subjectivity, Mobility, and Work in the Nepalese Hydroscape

Abstract

This essay focuses ethnographic attention on changing patterns of subjectivity, livelihood, and agency co-arising within the production of Nepal's imagined hydropower future. As the projects and processes of hydropower development proliferate across the physical and human geographies of Nepal they produce many different kinds of risk and opportunity, as well as labor, mobility, and 'project-affected people'. Combining empirical and visual methods, this essay describes how these lived hydroscapes are shaped by shifting concepts of locality, belonging, citizenship, and 'affectedness' that are constantly evolving in response to an entanglement of aspirations and future-making projects.