MIASU Research Seminar – 2 June - Timothy Cooper

Logistics in the Time of Slow Internet: Intermittent Connections in Gilgit-Baltistan

Timothy Cooper (University of Cambridge)

What forms of enclosure and assembly arise in the discontinuity of energy and internet provision? In Pakistan’s constitutionally ambiguous region of Gilgit-Baltistan (GB), between 2023 - 2025, internet shutdowns and the implementation of a national firewall worsened existing intermittence, as the Army-run communications provider restricted connectivity in a region governed under security logics tied to the Kashmir dispute. Connectivity in GB was already materially precarious: wireless networks rely on fuel and hydropower, while fibre-optic infrastructure is vulnerable to landslides. Rather than framing these disruptions as technical failure or environmental disaster, it is possible to view “intermittence” as a hybrid attribute of media environments whose modalities shape time, work, and political belonging. Intermittence contributes to an anthropological understanding of how media environments can create the conditions for unequal contexts—turning emergencies into crises, disrupting education and livelihoods, and deepening the centralization of Internet governance or occupation.

Bio: Timothy Cooper is an anthropologist of media infrastructures and environmental media. He is currently a Smuts Research Fellow in Commonwealth Studies at the Centre of South Asian Studies in the Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS) at the University of Cambridge. His book Moral Atmospheres: Islam and Media in a Pakistani Marketplace (Columbia University Press, 2024) won the Claremont Prize for the Study of Religion. His work has also appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History, American Ethnologist, HAU, Ethnomusicology, and the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. He has also disseminated his research beyond the academy in the organization of a major international retrospective on Pakistani film at the British Film Institute, radio documentaries, and the production of four films screened at international festivals.