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