**CFP: De-centring Infrastructures**
<br>EUGEO 2019, May 15–18, Galway, Ireland
<br>
<br>Infrastructure enables and disables the movement of goods, people and
<br>ideas. Yet in most contexts, infrastructures evade notice and
<br>recognition, buried underground or backgrounded into the mundanity of
<br>day-to-day life (Star 1999). This paradox has given rise to a body of
<br>scholarship attuned to materialities, labours, practices and relations
<br>ignored by dominant technoscientific discourses and modes of production.
<br>Infrastructure studies is now a significant area of study, and has
<br>generated concepts, methodologies and debates across disciplinary
<br>divides (Anand, Gupta, and Appel 2018). In science and technology
<br>studies, it has helped unearth the codes and categories that shape and
<br>define social relations (Bowker and Star 1999). In anthropology and
<br>media studies, infrastructure has become an empirical focus and
<br>conceptual tool for exploring the imbrications of the technical and the
<br>natural (Larkin 2013; Peters 2015), and the citizen and the state (Anand
<br>2017). Urban geographers have long used the term to explore the
<br>spatially distributed and uneven processes of urban metabolism (Gandy
<br>2003), as well as questions of public utility access, maintenance and
<br>governance (Graham and Marvin 2001). Recently, imaginaries of
<br>Eurocentric, liberal modernity have been challenged through a
<br>re-thinking of postcolonial and decolonial infrastructures and urbanisms
<br>(Roy 2015; McFarlane, Silver, and Truelove 2016).
<br>
<br>For this session, we hope to build on this scholarship by inviting
<br>papers that work with and through 'infrastructure' as a concept that
<br>de-centres humanist accounts of progress and social change, and the
<br>familiar sites and objects of academic research. We ask:
<br>
<br>- How does infrastructure brace society, technology and nature in ways
<br>that challenge linear, anthropocentric visions of history and
<br>development?
<br>- How do the spatialities and temporalities of infrastructure make
<br>evident new political ecologies of water, energy, information, toxicity,
<br>and climate change?
<br>- What does infrastructure allow us to see and say about the limitations
<br>of, and challenges for, activist politics and organising?
<br>- What might it mean to de-centre our research on infrastructures of and
<br>for the Global North, the city and the human?
<br>- How might we pursue new interdisciplinary insights and connections
<br>that build upon, but also challenge, the assumptions of infrastructure
<br>studies?
<br>
<br>We welcome papers of an empirical and theoretical nature that seek to
<br>engage with these issues, debates and literatures in an open but
<br>provocative manner. Please send your title and 250 word abstract by
<br>**January 21, 2019** to Jim White (jmerrick@tcd.ie), Patrick Bresnihan
<br>(pbresnih@tcd.ie) or Arielle Hesse (ahesse@tcd.ie), of the [WISDOM
<br>project](http://waterschemes.ie).
<br>
<br>**References**
<br>
<br>- Anand, Nikhil. (2017). _Hydraulic city: Water and the infrastructures
<br>of citizenship in Mumbai_. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
<br>- Anand, Nikhil, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel, eds. (2018). _The
<br>Promise of Infrastructure_. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
<br>- Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star. (1999). _Sorting Things
<br>Out: Classification and Its Consequences_. Cambridge and London: The MIT
<br>Press.
<br>- Gandy, Matthew. (2003). _Concrete and Clay: Reworking nature in New
<br>York City_. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press.
<br>- Graham, Stephen, and Simon Marvin. (2001). _Splintering Urbanism:
<br>Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban
<br>Condition_. London: Routledge.
<br>- Larkin, Brian. (2013). "The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure."
<br>_Annual Review of Anthropology_, 42: 328–43.
<br>- McFarlane, Colin, Jonathan Silver, and Yaffa Truelove. (2016). "Cities
<br>Within Cities: Intra-Urban Comparison of Infrastructure in Mumbai, Delhi
<br>and Cape Town." _Urban Geography_, 38 (9): 1393–1417.
<br>- Peters, John Durham. (2015). Infrastructuralism: Media as Traffic
<br>between Nature and Culture. In Marion Näser-Lather and Christoph
<br>Neubert, eds. _Traffic: Media as Infrastructures and Cultural
<br>Practices_. Leiden: Brill|Rodopi, 31–49.
<br>- Roy, Ananya. (2015). "What Is Urban About Critical Urban Theory?"
<br>_Urban Geography_, 37 (6): 810–823.
<br>- Star, Susan Leigh. (1999). "The Ethnography of Infrastructure."
<br>_American Behavioral Scientist_, 43 (3): 377–391.
<br>
<br>--
<br>Jim Merricks White
<br>Department of Geography
<br>Trinity College Dublin
<br>jmerrick@tcd.ie
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