Crisis in the meantime: Infrastructure and environmental transformations
Discussant: Kregg Hetherington (Concordia University)
In times of profound environmental transformations across local and global scales, state authorities and engineers have increased efforts to establish infrastructure that will “contain” the most harmful consequences of various anticipated catastrophes. In addition, people seek to “proof” existing and prospective infrastructure against the threat of future environmental crisis and disruption. Far from being “a call to study boring things” (Star 1999) that only reveal themselves in failure, attending to infrastructure in times of unprecedented environmental crises requires an appreciation that such projects are often highly foregrounded for users and planners.
As others have noted, infrastructure projects, rather than as a barely heard “background hum” to the smooth flow of goods and services, are often highly visible in particular locations. Acknowledging this, we wish here to push for a consideration of how increasingly unruly environments dynamically play into the promises and aspirations that infrastructure are said to contain. In this way, we seek to investigate how infrastructure becomes a constitutive factor in our relation with the environment: while some may find hope and increased stability in projects of preparedness, others distrust government authorities and engineering knowledges, lacking faith in their efficacy.
Acknowledging that infrastructure helps shape our relation with past and prospective environmental change, this panel explores the potential of infrastructure to generate distinct temporalities that bring to the fore ongoing legacies and future potentialities of transformation and disruption. We are particularly concerned with how people’s engagement with infrastructure shapes the production of particular temporalities – or a distinct “meantime” – before and between potential catastrophic events. We invite proposals for papers that consider how infrastructure amidst environmental transformation may fail to meet people’s needs and worries, or shift people’s relation with an environment ever on the move and that address themes of environmental transformation, temporality and infrastructure across spatial and temporal scales.
Panel convenors: Tom Boyd (Manchester University) and Noah Walker-Crawford (Manchester University)
Please send an abstract of 250 words to [log in to unmask] and [log in to unmask] by 24th March.
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Noah Walker-Crawford
PhD Candidate, Social Anthropology
University of Manchester
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