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Quirin Rieder is currently a PhD student at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Vienna. His PhD project deals with questions of access to infrastructure, energy justice, and self-governance, based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Gilgit-Baltistan, Northern Pakistan, between 2022 and 2023. In a context of extreme load-shedding (electricity poverty) and political marginalization, his thesis focuses on the transformative role of energy sharing and community-owned hydro-powerplants, and relates changes in communal land ownership and rural political mobilization to climate change and transnational infrastructural projects. Linking the sensory experience of electricity shortage with state and non-state energy development, it investigates the contingencies and inequalities of contemporary energy politics. Through this, the thesis will show how infrastructural practices of “caring through electricity” shape social organization and subjectivities/identities.
RCC Research Project: Caring Through Electricity: Transforming Political Subjectivities and Environments Through Access to Electricity in Hunza, Northern Pakistan
Selected Publications:
- “Drinking Tea with the IMF: Sticking to Prices and Protesting Inflation in Aliabad, Northern Pakistan.” Focaal Blog. December 10, 2024. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/12/10/quirin-rieder-drinking-tea-with-the-imf-sticking-to-prices-and-protesting-inflation-in-aliabad-northern-pakistan.
- Review of Intimate Connections: Love and Marriage in Pakistan’s High Mountains, by Anna-Maria Walter. Social Anthropology / Anthropologie Sociale 32, no. 2 (2024): 120–22. https://doi.org/10.3167/saas.2024.320209.
- Review of Queer Companions: Religion, Public Intimacy, and Saintly Affects in Pakistan, by Omar Kasmani. Sociologus 73, no. 1 (2023): 100–102. https://doi.org/10.3790/soc.2023.1452906.
- with Konstantin Veit, Nikolaj Moretti, Luis Peters, and Celine Li. “Power to which People? Energiegerechtigkeit und ownership-Strukturen in Energiegenossenschaften” [Power to Which People? Energy Justice and Ownership Structures in Energy Cooperatives]. In Umweltgerechtigkeit und sozialökologische Transformation: Konflikte um Nachhaltigkeit im deutschsprachigen Raum [Environmental Justice and Socioecological Transformation: Conflicts over Sustainability in the German-Speaking World], edited by Silja Klepp and Jonas Hein. transcript, 2023. https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839463253-005.
- “Living Along Infrastructural Lines: Following Electricity in Hunza.” In One World Anthropology and Beyond: A Multidisciplinary Engagement with the Work of Tim Ingold, edited by Martin Porr and Niels Weidtmann. Routledge, 2023. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003162773-18.
- Ingold, Tim. Eine kurze Geschichte der Linien. Translated by Quirin Rieder. Konstanz University Press, 2021. https://www.k-up.de/9783835391284-eine-kurze-geschichte-der-linien.html.