EP #347 - 09.29.2021 - Legal Regimes Under Pandemic Conditions: The Case of Plastics

Today I talk with Geoffrey Hughes and Tridibesh Dey about legal regimes under pandemic conditions—especially in Jordan and India.

Tridibesh Dey is a final-year PhD candidate in the Anthropology of Science and Technology at the University of Exeter. His broader research themes involve plastics, process, technologies of plastic waste management, and infrastructures. His thesis, due for submission this year, is a careful ethnographic study of the different processes of plastic and practical networks, including informal recycling and a combustion-based large-scale national infrastructure of solid waste management being developed in India. Conceptually, it examines mutability as a tool to study plastic's complex ubiquity.

Geoffrey Hughes is a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Exeter and Associate Editor of the Journal of Legal Anthropology. His work explores how people in the contemporary Middle East are responding to new technologies for large-scale population management. He has written a number of articles on various social engineering projects in Jordan. His new book is entitled, Kinship, Islam and the Politics of Marriage in Jordan: Affection and Mercy.