Imaginaries from a Blackout · Everyday Encounters with Infrastructure in the Arab World (original) (raw)
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Middle East : Topics & Arguments, 2018
In the following interview, Ronen Shamir discusses the theoretical and methodological implications of researching infrastructure against the background of his own work on electrification in Mandatory Palestine. He draws our attention to the (post-)colonial genealogies of infrastructure and their role in shaping not just the common perceptions of a region called “Middle East”, but also manufacturing/creating/ producing/constructing this region by means material and social (dis-)connections. Throughout the interview, Shamir stresses on how infrastructural systems shape people’s everyday experiences with their physical surroundings. His emphasis points to the understanding of infrastructure as processes of assembling and disassembling people, everyday objects. We invited Ronen Shamir to this interview in order to put his work into a critical dialogue/exchange with the papers featured in this issue. As a prominent scholar of colonial infrastructure, we are convinced that his work and hi...
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2018
The 10th issue of Middle East – Topics and Arguments engages with infrastructure studies from an interdisciplinary perspective. It presents different empirical cases and theoretical discussions that take infrastructural formations and their effects both to the center stage and as the analytical focus. In this editorial, we first discuss two epistemic locations from which infrastructure can be studied. Then, we highlight the featured authors and the way each of them make compelling cases through the lenses of material and social infrastructures in different MENA contexts. In light of these, we argue that infrastructures, as the material conditions of modern human life, have shaped and continue to shape geographical constructs of the Middle East and North Africa. Lastly, we call for further social and historical research to investigate how infrastructural systems as material and symbolic networks of imperial expansion and exploitation have contributed to the geographical and political entities that make up the construct called MENA.
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Reading Waste Siege in 2020 under a near-global quarantine, it is becoming clear that even universal threats overlap topographies of profoundly disproportionate risk and state management that were baked in decades ago. Seemingly natural phenomena are distributed spatially on the basis of social relations, structural racism, political economy and disinvestment in social reproduction and infrastructure; this pandemic exposes preexisting social conditions and comorbidities. Although Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins' marvelous new book is about waste management in Palestine, it asks extremely timely and relevant questions about the putative universality of environmental threats, mobility, fixity, political violence, and state governance.
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Book review: Infrastructural Lives: Urban Infrastructure in Context
Urban Studies, 2016
Infrastructural Lives: Urban Infrastructure in Context is a timely publication that brings together a wide range of scholarship on the interactions between urban lives and socio-material infrastructures across different socio-political and geographical contexts. In the introductory chapter, Graham and McFarlane envision that the edited volume will fill a gap in the current scholarship on infrastructure and urbanism. In bringing together accounts of how complexes of infrastructure mediate urban life, the authors aim to make visible 'the people of the world's burgeoning cities, and the ways in which they experience urban lives that intermesh with, and are sustained by, the complexes of infrastructure' (p. 1). In order to focus the debate on the ways in infrastructures are produced, lived with and contested, and how infrastructures subjugate or facilitate urban lives, the authors have split the 10 chapters in four thematic parts.