Dear Sir/Madam
<br>
<br>Please could you circulate this via your listserve.
<br>Many thanks for your assistance
<br>
<br>****
<br>
<br>Dear Colleagues,
<br>
<br>We invite submissions of abstracts to the following Open Panel at the 4S
<br>conference, 2019, in New Orleans. Please also share with colleagues and
<br>students who may find this interesting.
<br>
<br>Many thanks
<br>
<br>David Tyfield (d.tyfield@lancaster.ac.uk)
<br>
<br>4S CONFERENCE OPEN PANEL
<br>2019 New Orleans Sept 4-7
<br>
<br>Open Panel 167: The Belt Road
<br>Initiative: Infrastructural Futures & a Chinese Anthropocene?
<br>
<br>
<br>The Belt Road Initiative (BRI), aka the New Silk Roads, is often feted as the
<br>largest infrastructural programme not just in the world today, but ever. First
<br>announced by Xi Jinping in 2013, it has garnered increasing commentary and
<br>scrutiny, but focusing overwhelmingly on high-level geo-political issues,
<br>largely defined by existing 'common-senses'. Meanwhile, in STS and critical
<br>geographies, an 'infrastructural turn' (Graham 2010) has illuminated questions
<br>of infrastructure - its in/visibility & blackboxing, disruption, maintenance,
<br>complexity and networked interconnection - as a key issue for contemporary
<br>politics; and, indeed, for the contemporary redefinition of 'politics' itself
<br>regarding onto-politics, materiality, virtuality, embodiment and liveliness.
<br>Booming discussions (largely Western) of the Anthropocene and technosphere, in
<br>which issues of infrastructure are central if often overlooked, are also of
<br>relevance here, not least in terms of how these will be shaped by the
<br>increasing, but unfamiliar and uncertain, global influence of China. In this
<br>context, the emergence of an infrastructure programme that would not just be
<br>unprecedented in scale, but also a vehicle for the geopolitical ascendancy of
<br>the first non-trans-Atlantic global hegemon, presents arguably the key arena
<br>to test and develop further the conceptual and theoretical innovations of the
<br>infrastructural turn. Yet the BRI remains largely ignored from this
<br>perspective. This panel thus invites papers that will explore how the BRI and
<br>STS can illuminate and develop each other, and the key ques tion of
<br>infrastructural global futures amidst the Anthropocene and/or China's concept
<br>of 'Ecological Civilization'.
<br>
<br>
<br>Organizers
<br>David Tyfield (Lancaster University, UK)
<br>Marius Korsnes (NTNU, Norway)
<br>Andrew Chubb (Lancaster University, UK)
<br>
<br>Submissions
<br>The deadline for submissions at the conference website
<br>(https://convention2.allacademic.com/one/ssss/4s19/ or via
<br>https://www.4s2019.org/call-for-submissions/) is February 1st, 2019
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