Infrastructure and the environment in anthropology (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.
Analyzing Infrastructures in the Anthropocene
Historical Social Research, 2022
»Die Analyse von Infrastrukturen im Anthropozän«. This contribution takes the multiple ecological crises as the background to connect discourses on sustainability and infrastructures. It discusses the preservation, development, or disorder of infrastructures by different actors and practices in the context of diverse imaginaries of sustainability. When infrastructures are addressed and scrutinized against different visions of the future, their orderforming elements, dysfunctionalities, and transformation potentials come to the fore. The question of which decisions, translations, and norms are inscribed in infrastructures is of particular importance in the discourses on ecology. Moreover, focusing on the planetary dimensions of the ecological crisis adds particular complexity to the infrastructural analysis. An ecological perspective fundamentally challenges the view of infrastructure, as traditional concepts are no longer able to contribute to necessary planetary solutions. Since struggles for the futures of sustainability are struggles for the modernization and transformation of, as well as control over and through (material, immaterial, planetary), infrastructures, we argue that infrastructures will and should receive special attention in the social sciences and humanities in the future.
Of Ruins and Ruination: Infrastructures Against the Anthropocene
Adaptive Reuse in Latin America: Cultural Identity, Values and Memory, 2024
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, José Bernardi; individual chapters, the contributors The right of José Bernardi to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Afterword: Some Unintentional Consequences of Infrastructure
Infrastructural Being, 2022
About the book as such (with relevance for the Afterword): This book provides a comprehensive insight into the contemporary naturecultural world by exploring infrastructures through the dwelling approach. The notion of naturecultures has been utilized in environmental humanities and social sciences to emphasize the inherent messiness of the lived world and the inseparability of social and biophysical elements. Concept of naturecultures stresses that seemingly “natural” is always simultaneously “cultural” and vice versa. This approach allows fleshing out the messy engagements with infrastructures, which in this book is conceptualized as infrastructural being. This book is a contribution to emerging discussions on infrastructures in the fields of environmental social sciences and humanities. It sensitizes to the peculiarities of modern dwelling and modern, yet often overlooked, ways of being connected with nature. Moreover, it provides tools for speculating, how could things be otherwise. The book is a topical response to the urgent call for developing new forms of human-nature relations in times of environmental turbulence.
Infrastructure, Environment and Life in the Anthropocene
Duke University Press, 2019
Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene explores life in the age of climate change through a series of infrastructural puzzles—sites at which it has become impossible to disentangle the natural from the built environment. With topics ranging from breakwaters built of oysters, underground rivers made by leaky pipes, and architecture gone weedy to neighborhoods partially submerged by rising tides, the contributors explore situations that destabilize the concepts we once relied on to address environmental challenges. They take up the challenge that the Anthropocene poses both to life on the planet and to our social-scientific understanding of it by showing how past conceptions of environment and progress have become unmoored and what this means for how we imagine the future. Contributors. Nikhil Anand, Andrea Ballestero, Bruce Braun, Ashley Carse, Gastón R. Gordillo, Kregg Hetherington, Casper Bruun Jensen, Joseph Masco, Shaylih Muehlmann, Natasha Myers, Stephanie Wakefield, Austin Zeiderman
2019
Infrastructures have proven to be useful focal points for understanding social phenomena. The projects of concern in this literature are often considered complete or, if not, their materialization is assumed to be imminent. However, many—if not most—of the engineered artifacts and systems classified as infrastructure exist in states aptly characterized as unbuilt or unfinished. Bringing together scholarship on unbuilt and unfinished infrastructures from anthropology, architecture, geography, history, and science and technology studies, this article examines the ways in which temporalities articulate as planners, builders, politicians, potential users, and opponents negotiate with a project and each another. We develop a typology of heuristics for analyzing the temporalities of the unbuilt and unfinished: shadow histories, present absences, suspended presents, nostalgic futures, and zombies. Each heuristic makes different temporal configurations visible, suggesting novel research questions and methodological approaches.