The Political Lives of Infrastructure (original) (raw)
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The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure. Annual Review of Anthropology. 42: 327-43. 2013.
Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological literature that seeks to theorize infrastructure by drawing on biopolitics, science and technology studies, and theories of tech-nopolitics. I also examine other dimensions of infrastructures that release different meanings and structure politics in various ways: through the aesthetic and the sensorial, desire and promise.
The Promise of Infrastructure, 2018
From U.S.-Mexico border walls to Flint's poisoned pipes, there is a new urgency to the politics of infrastructure. Roads, electricity lines, water pipes, and oil installations promise to distribute the resources necessary for everyday life. Yet an attention to their ongoing processes also reveals how infrastructures are made with fragile and often violent relations among people, materials, and institutions. While infrastructures promise modernity and development, their breakdowns and absences reveal the underbelly of progress, liberal equality, and economic growth. This tension, between aspiration and failure, makes infrastructure a productive location for social theory. Contributing to the everyday lives of infrastructure across four continents, some of the leading anthropologists of infrastructure demonstrate in The Promise of Infrastructure how these more-than-human assemblages made over more-than-human lifetimes offer new opportunities to theorize time, politics, and promise in the contemporary moment.
The Transnational State and the Infrastructure Push
New Political Economy, 2017
In 2010 the G20 in cooperation with major international organizations launched a comprehensive effort-here labelled the infrastructure push-to promote infrastructure investments around the world. Using selected transnationalised elements from historical materialism, this is explained as a transnational state initiative to secure general material conditions for capitalist growth in a manner that is profoundly shaped by power relations. The infrastructure problem was allowed to grow during neoliberalism because of the hegemony of finance; the push is a result of and reflects a weakening of finance and strengthening of industrial interests in the transnational power bloc, as well as a strengthening of the emerging economies. This potential hegemonic project has gained the support of the global labour movement, while also been subject to serious criticism from civil society organizations, speaking for the most vulnerable subaltern social forces. The empirical analysis also shows that the transnational state in this policy area works as a flexible, networked cooperation of G20 states and leading international organizations in ongoing dialogue with non-state actors, especially transnational business. In this cooperation, the international organizations have a relatively autonomous role in line with a historical materialist understanding of state apparatuses.
Art History, 2023
Infrastructure and Power in the Global South
2019
The study of infrastructure by the humanists and social scientists was incubated some twenty years ago in the field of STS (science and technology studies). Interest in infrastructure has ballooned since then, with STS scholars entering into conversation with area studies, post/colonial studies, and other scholarship on the “Global South.” These conversations have produced dramatic new understandings of what “infrastructures” are, how to theorize them, and how to analyze them as conduits of social and political power. This course offers a graduate-level introduction to these conversations, drawing primarily on works from STS, anthropology, history, geography, and (to a lesser extent) architecture & urban studies.
Decolonizing Methodologies: Ethics of Infrastructure Development in the Rural
Journal of Ibn Haldun Studies, Ibn Haldun University, 2019
The Prime Minister of India marked 28th April 2018 as a historic day in the journey of Indian development. Through a tweet, he claimed that on this day electricity has reached to each and every village in India. Taking this claim as a starting point, this paper looks into Rural Electrification and Politics of Infrastructure in Khannat, a village in south east of Madhya Pradesh. This paper is a reflection on a collaborative action research on rural electrification in the village Khannat. It proposes to show how this intervention cannot merely be read as an intervention around energy and Infrastructure. It shows that through the tropes of rural electrification, how 'infrastructure' can be a method to revisit village studies. Infrastructure in the history of development thought has been tied to the idea of 'growth' and 'modernity'. This work is based on a methodology that is premised on knowledge production through immersion in a 'local' world. However, 'infrastructure' is a concept that is clearly 'translocal'. Thus, it aims to unpack the ethnocentric view of infrastructure and explore if the community can produce its own idiom of infrastructure. Through rural electrification, this paper aims to critique the way Infrastructure Development is undertaken in rural India and how local meanings of infrastructure are completely ignored.