The organisers of the 2015 Anthropology in London day conference (
https://www.soas.ac.uk/anthropology/events/anthropology-in-london-2015/)
would welcome any additional paper abstracts that might fit into the
following panel. Please email these to [log in to unmask] by 10 March 2015.
PANEL PROPOSAL
ANTHROPOLOGY IN LONDON 2015
Broken connections and disjunctive speed: on the forensic wonder of
infrastructural failure
Panel Convenor: Mark Lamont (Goldsmiths)
Prompted by current debates about the cognitive and moral limits of
acceleration and speed, anthropologists are paying attention to the
emerging values of speed in a globalized economy premised on the promise of
connectivity. Emerging out of ethnographies about roads, call centers,
ageing nuclear energy plants, port facilities, waste treatment systems,
fish markets, ship breaking yards, and rust belts or ghost towns, the
smooth surface utopias of speed and connectivity come to be questioned more
intently. This is especially acute when the people within these sites of
engagement experience with some forensic wonder what happens when the
'machine' breaks down and they have to wrestle back for themselves a
'working order' out of breakdown and deterioration. While such studies
develop theory on the network of infrastructures and the techno-political
assemblages that manage and regulate our connected world, there is less
attention paid to the work of repair, maintenance, neglect, and sabotage of
infrastructure and its canalizing social effects. This panel aims to bring
a modest ethnographic testimony to what happens to people when such
infrastructures are disrupted, destroyed, or otherwise brought to a
grinding halt.
This panel invites ethnographies that delve into the forensics of
infrastructural failures: as when the very materiality of broken
connections - along roads, in ports, through routers - compels people to
engage with failure as an analytic object. How do people in a variety of
contexts repair, neglect, or abandon broken technologies and
infrastructure? Although the contexts of contributions may range
considerably, from decaying road infrastructures, to financial disruptions
caused by 'fat fingers', we aim to examine comparative instances of broken
connectivity and the forensic wonders that such accidental happenings or
processes conjure, towards generating new perspectives on the variable
temporality of infrastructural sociality through the lenses of disjunctive
speed and broken connectivity.
--
Stephanie Kitchen
Chair of the Publications Committee
International African Institute
School of Oriental and African Studies
Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG
www.internationalafricaninstitute.org
Tel: +44(0)20 7898 4435 (o)
+44(0)7966 045144 (m)
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