Professor, Department of Social Sciences, University of Fribourg, Switzerland
Biography
Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and head of the project ‘Maintaining Relations: Community-owned Hydropower Infrastructure Through Time’ (Swiss National Science Foundation, 2024-2028).
Agnieszka has spent more than four years studying and conducting research in China, first in the lush southwest, then in the megalopolises of Beijing and Shanghai, and most recently in the arid northwest. Since 2018, she has expanded her research to Kyrgyzstan and other Central Asian post-socialist countries, as well as to Central Europe. Between 2018-2023, Agnieszka led the research project ‘Roadwork: An Anthropology of Infrastructure at China’s Inner Asian Borders’, which focused on roads being built in the China-Central Asia borderlands as part of the One Belt One Road Initiative. Since 2019, Agnieszka has also been the Editor-in-Chief of the Open Access journal Roadsides.
In Maintaining Relations, Agnieszka is addressing the question of how decentral energy production can be successfully maintained over time and how it can strengthen economic and social structures in local communities. She is focusing on the Swiss Alps, where decentral hydropower production has been in place for more than a hundred years, providing valuable knowledge to help answer these questions.
Selected publications
Joniak-Lüthi, A. 2023. Ethnicizing infrastructure: roads, railways and differential mobility in northwest China. In The Central Asian World, edited by Jeanne Féaux de la Croix and Madeleine Reeves, 269-83. London and New York: Routledge.
Urmanbetova, Zarina and A. Joniak-Lüthi. 2021. Welcome and Unwelcome Connections: Travelling Post-Soviet Roads in Kyrgyzstan. Central Asian Survey 41 (2): 260-76. DOI: 10.1080/02634937.2021.1968346
Joniak-Lüthi, A. 2020. A road, a disappearing river and fragile connectivity in Sino-Inner Asian borderlands. Political Geography 78. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2019.102122
Joniak-Lüthi, A. 2019. Maintaining whose road? In: Francisco Martinez and Patrick Laviolette. Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough: Ethnographic Responses (‘Material Mediations’ series). New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Pp. 261-67.
Joniak-Lüthi, A. 2019. Introduction: Infrastructure as an Asynchronic Timescape. Roadsides 1: 3-10. DOI: https://doi.org/10.26034/roadsides-20190012
