Politics in Infrastructures: Power, Ecology, Society

optional courses

The course is open to all students at any level, but some basic background in anthropology will be welcome. Students must be prepared to read and actively discuss advanced academic texts in English (some 30 pages week-to-week), and to write their original course essay in English.

This course draws on the growing interdisciplinary literature on the social lives of diverse material infrastructures. It explores infrastructure not merely as taken-for-granted background or passive object of politics, but as agentive and generative of political effects. To do so, the course combines ethnographic and theoretical readings from anthropology, sociology, geography, political science and Science and Technology Studies.

The study of infrastructures is a booming field in current social and cultural anthropology. Once deemed ‘boring things’, on closer inspection infrastructures surprise with their material vitally, agentive capacities and socio-political imports. ‘Politics in Infrastructure: Power, Economy, Society’ draws on the recently growing interdisciplinary literature on the social lives of diverse material infrastructures. It combines ethnographic and theoretical readings from anthropology, sociology, geography, political science and Science and Technology Studies. How are infrastructures socially produced and, conversely, how do they become constitutive factors in shaping relations of power, economic circulations and social order? How do they serve social engineering and ordering powers? How is the socio-political work of infrastructures contested? What might be the unexpected effects of infrastructures' own material agency? In what ways do infrastructures entangle with other kinds of beings, creating novel ontological arrangements? Exploring these and related question, the course offers innovative insights on the nature and meaning of the political and brings to light the usually taken-for-granted gridworks underpinning social worlds.

Preliminary reading list (subject to change - definitely not all of the below will be include, while some readings from beyond this list may be added):

Anand, N., 2013. ‘Municipal Disconnect: On Abject Water and its Urban Infrastructures’, Ethnography 13(4):487-509.

Appel, H., 2012, ‘Walls and White Elephants: Oil Extraction, Responsibility, and Infrastructural Violence in Equatorial Guinea’, Ethnography 13(4):439–465.

Barry, A., 2013, Material Politics: Disputes along the Pipeline, Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, pages 137-153.

Bennett, J., 2010, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham: Duke University Press, pages 20-38.

Campbell, J., 2012, ‘Between the Material and the Figural Road: The Incompleteness of Colonial Geographies in Amazonia’, Mobilities 7(4):481 500.

Carse, A., 2017, ‘Keyword: Infrastructure. How a Humble French Engineering Term Shaped the Modern World’, in P. Harvey, CB Jensen and A. Morita (eds), Infrastructures and Social Complexity: A Companion, New York: Routledge.

Chu, J., 2014, ‘When Infrastructures Attack: The Workings of Disrepair in China’, American Ethnologist 41(2):351-367.

Collier, S., 2011, Post-Soviet Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Dalakoglou, D., 2012, ‘“The Road from Capitalism to Capitalism”: Infrastructures of (Post)Socialism in Albania’, Mobilities 7(4):571 586.

Dias, N., 2010, ‘Exploring the Senses and Exploiting the Land: Railroads, Bodies and Measurement in Nineteenth-Century French Colonies’, in T. Bennett and P. Joyce (eds), Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn, London: Routledge, pages 171 189.

Edwards, P., 2003, ‘Infrastructure and Modernity: Force Time and Social Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems’, in TJ Misa, P. Brey and A. Feenberg (eds), Modernity and Technology, Cambridge: MIT Press, pages 185 225.

Harvey, P., 2005, ‘The Materiality of State Effects: An Ethnography of a Road in the Peruvian Andes’, in C. Krohn-Hansen and KG Nustad (eds), State Formation: Anthropological Perspectives, London: Pluto Press, pages 123 141.

Harvey, P. and H. Knox, 2012, ‘The Enchantments of Infrastructure’, Mobilities 7(4):521 536.

Humphrey, C., 2005, ‘Ideology in Infrastructure: Architecture and the Soviet Imagination’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11:39-58.

Ishii, M., 2017, ‘Caring for Divine Infrastructures: Nature and Spirits in a Special Economic Zone in India’, Ethnos 82(4): 690 710.

Jensen, CB, 2017, ‘Multinatural Infrastructure: Phnom Penh Sewage’, in P. Harvey, CB Jensen and A. Morita (eds), Infrastructures and Social Complexity: A Companion, New York: Routledge.

Jensen, CB and A. Morita, 2017, ‘Introduction: Infrastructures as Ontological Experiments’, Ethnos 82(4): 615 626.

Knox, H., 2017, ‘Affective Infrastructures and the Political Imagination’, Public Culture 29(2(82)):363 384.

Larkin, B., 2013, ‘The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure’, Annual Review of Anthropology 42:327–343.

Larkin, B., 2008, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure and Urban Culture in Nigeria, Durham: Duke University Press, pages 16-47.

Masquelier, A., 2002, ‘Road Mythographies: Space, Mobility and the Historical Imagination in Postcolonial Niger’, American Ethnologist 29(4):829-856.

Pedersen, MA and M. Bunkenborg, 2012, ‘Roads that Separate: Sino-Mongolian Relations in the Inner Asian Desert’, Mobilities 7(4):555 569.

Reeves, M., 2016, ‘Infrastructural Hope: Anticipating “Independent Roads” and Territorial Integrity in Southern Kyrgyzstan’, Ethnos, DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2015.1119176

Rodgers, D. and B. O’Neill, 2012, ‘Infrastructural Violence: Introduction to the Special Issue’, Ethnography 13(4):401 412.

Rodgers, D., 2012, ‘Haussmannization in the Tropics: Abject Urbanism and Infrastructural Violence in Nicaragua’, Ethnography 13(4):413 438.

Schwenkel, C., 2015, ‘Spectacular Infrastructure and its Breakdown in Socialist Vietnam’, American Ethnologist 42(3):520 534.

Simone, A., 2004, ‘People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg’, Public Culture 16(3):407-429.

Street, A., 2012, ‘Affective Infrastructure: Hospital Landscapes of Hope and Failure’, Space and Culture 15(1):44 56.

Von Schnitzler, A., 2008. ‘Citizenship Prepaid: Water, Calculability and Techno-Politics in South Africa’, Journal of Southern African Studies 34(4):899-917.

Weizman, Eyal, 2017, Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation, London: Verso

Course essay (max 2,500 words, in English) on a freely chosen topic related to the course. The topic must be accepted by the teacher before writing. The essay must engage with at least two of the readings discussed during the course. Details to be discussed, TBA.

Additional criteria: class activity, oral presentation on a chosen topic (voluntary).