Introduction: Infrastructures as Ontological Experiments (original) (raw)
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Concept note: Infrastructures as Ontological Experiments
Ontology has recently gained renewed attention in science and technology studies and anthropology (e.g. Gad, Jensen and Winthereik 2015; Holbraad, Pedersen and Viveiros de Castro 2014; Woolgar and Lezaun 2013). Yet, it has a considerably longer pedigree than these recent debates might lead one to think. Experiments, of course, have long held the attention of sociologists, historians, and philosophers of science (Collins 1985; Gooding 1990; Shapin and Schaffer 1985). And infrastructures have been the focus of sustained inquiry in the sociology and history of technology (Bowker 1994; Hughes 1983). Once these terms are put into conjunction, however, each gets a somewhat different inflection. The following note briefly explores the conceptual purchase of considering infrastructures as ontological experiments.
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.
Introduction: infrastructure as relational and experimental process
The Social and Political Life of Latin American Infrastructures, 2022
From houses to roads, infrastructures offer a unique lens through which to explore social and political change. Serving as an important conduit between states and citizens, infrastructures provide governments with a powerful tool to mould subjects and control populations. Yet, at the same time they also give individuals, communities, and movements a platform to challenge the state and forge alternative forms of citizenship and politics. Infrastructures therefore shape social and political relations in unexpected ways and never dutifully follow the scripts of politicians, bureaucrats, and engineers. Latin America provides fertile terrain to explore these issues. The region has been subject to extensive foreign intervention for centuries and much of its infrastructure has primarily been constructed to benefit colonial and imperial powers. Yet Latin America has also seen widespread resistance to colonial-capitalist expansion, and infrastructures have been central to these diverse struggles. Drawing on recent empirical research, this cross-disciplinary book demonstrates the value of analysing social and political change through infrastructure. The authors explore a diverse range of Latin American infrastructures, from a sparkling new tram network in Ecuador to a crumbling old nuclear plant in Cuba. Building on the empirical chapters, the editors demonstrate the value of conceptualising infrastructure as a relational and experimental process. In addition to making a novel contribution to global infrastructure debates, the volume offers important new insights into Latin American history, society, and politics.
The Political Lives of Infrastructure
Radical History Review
This issue explores the historical production of infrastructures as places of resistance and world-building for workers, villagers, and migrants across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—a period when narratives about the role of infrastructure as a conduit for modernization, development, and the centralizing capacities of the state had broad purchase. Contributions invite consideration of two questions. First, what struggles do histories of infrastructural power reveal if infrastructures are delinked from master narratives tying them to state and state-backed centralization? While development, nation building, and extraction are often state-sponsored or state-backed projects, the articles here demonstrate that modern states are not the only wielders of infrastructural power. Second, how does this decentering of the state in infrastructural analyses transform the stakes of radical political activity and the work of radical historical actors? In highlighting a different, ...
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.