S (Stephanie) Ketterer, PhD

A sociocultural anthropologist by training, my research investigates the everyday politics that surround rural development initiatives. Specifically, I am curious about when, why and how rural residents engage with infrastructures, large and small, and the often idealized futures that they promise. My goal is to better understand the place-based dynamics that give rise to frequently shifting, even contradictory, perspectives on, and responses to rural infrastructures, be it an open embrace, indifference or active resistance. Simultaneously, my research increasingly aims to untangle how everyday rural dynamics are embedded in a planetary metabolism that spans the geography of the earth and an increasingly geopolitically fragmented world, and that is realized through infrastructural and technological transformations. I ask how this metabolism shapes possibilities for liveable futures, in particular rural environments and at a planetary scale.

I am currently working on two related research lines:

Rural Development and Planetary Datafication

The core of this research line is my NWO-Vidi project which interrogates the foray of hyperscale data centers into rural areas with an emphasis on the everyday political and social formations surrounding these initiatives, while prioritizing rural residents’ perspectives. Hyperscale developers promise pathways to rural revitalization through improved infrastructures including electricity and transportation, all while straining existing infrastructural networks and facilitating droughts and farmland degradation. Based on comparative ethnographic research, key project objectives are (1) to explain how rural politics shape, and are shaped by, hyperscalers as promissory development infrastructures; (2) to assess the current rural hyperscaler sprawl in view of frontline residents’ experiences with broader histories of infrastructural integration; and (3) to uncover, likely competing, visions for liveable rural futures with and beyond hyperscalers.

Everyday Politics within and beyond the State

My second research line is a continuation of my longstanding interest in political anthropology and especially the anthropology of the state. While a planetary framework emphasizes the need to move beyond a state-centric perspective, the state, as a political system, in many ways remains central to understanding and examining the everyday politics of rural residents that lie at the heart of my own work. In this context, my research considers the seeming ‘unthinkability’ of the state as dominant political system while also exploring how, when and why it becomes possible to ‘decenter’ the state not only in an imagined future but in past and present lives. My longstanding research in Solomon Islands is central to this research line while I am also collaborating closely with the Cuba-team of Martijn Koster’s ERC project on the Politics of the Periphery to better understand imaginaries of the state among marginalized residents and street-level bureaucrats in contemporary Cuba.