Dear all,
Apologies for x-postings. Let me know if you would be interested in contributing to the following panel and please forward to anyone interested.
All the best
Omar
...
Material Lives : Resisting infrastructures and infrastructures of resistance
From America to Asia, infrastructural unrest is thriving as grassroots movements resist the privatisation of water, electricity, health, education and food systems; mobilise to stop the construction of prisons, walls and military bases; confront the laying of oil and gas pipes; challenge the expansion of highways, damns and airports; occupy banks, government buildings and squares; battle against telecommunication surveillance; and fight the labor conditions and closure of factories. These struggles—which are simultaneously local, regional and global—coalesce around and aim at the infrastructure that makes accessible, readable, extractable, and governable resources turned into commodities, from land and water to information and bodies. As such, these communities are targeting the very foundations that enable imperialism, colonialism, capitalism and the nation-state to extend its reach and sustain through time and space.
Because of their understanding of the socio-material and technical worlds we inhabit, these coalitions of resistance expose the profound political and enduring nature of these complex assemblages. Activists, organisers and their supporters contribute to unveil how these projects produce and reproduce racialized, gendered and class-based social orders. They debunk the expert-crafted political and economic narratives that define infrastructures —so often concealed as necessary technical acts and fantasies of liberalism, modernisation, development and securitisation. Most crucially, they reveal the relations contained within infrastructures, the actors that plan them, the law that legitimizes them, the discourses and imaginaries that shape them, the knowledge gone into their design, the labour used to build them, the contested histories of their construction, the broader structural forces that shape them, and the ways in which they are experienced. Thus while infrastructure are shown as the historical and contemporary sources of power and fragility that they are, seemingly unimportant struggles against a road or a pipe become terrains of political contestation that can quickly turn into broader and crucial fights against authoritarian regimes.
One also needs to take into consideration that resisting infrastructures necessarily involves an infrastructure of resistance. As part of their resolve, communities develop people-powered networks that employ a wide range of tactics, skills, knowledge and forces to counter and sometimes subvert infrastructural violence. These networks provide other forms of infrastructure beyond the technologies and systems they are part of and often related to, they conform actual collective infrastructures that are used to empower as well as cover the needs and aspirations of marginalised, oppressed and dissatisfied communities. And in doing so they build and envision alternative and autonomous social, political, economic and material worlds. In other words, they create infrastructures for autonomy and self-sufficiency that consolidate around broader struggles and open up spaces of political possibility. These infrastructures of resistance may be incipient, precarious and fragile. Yet, not taking them seriously is failing to acknowledge the potential of these spaces of political organisation to challenge the imperatives of capitalist control and the colonisation of everyday life.
This discussion panel seeks to bring together cases that illustrate the ways infrastructure —broadly understood as analytical category and metaphor—provide a terrain to think critically about politics and the political. We hope to include contributions from scholars and activists that explore and question the connections between people and infrastructure from the vantage point of grassroots struggles against and for infrastructure. Against the violence embedded in these material worlds. And for creating alternative infrastructures designed for autonomy, emancipation, and justice. In doing so we would like to engage in a collective exercise to explore infrastructure in ways that not simply focus upon the characteristics of these objects, in its actual materiality, but that also address the situated experiences of our material lives, the constitution of infrastructure worlds and concomitantly its shaping of political practices and experiences as well as its extension into growing spheres of life.
We welcome historical and contemporary empirical work from a wide range of sites, and with a variety of theoretical orientations. A series of questions would be pre-circulated among the participants before the panel takes place.
Please submit your abstract of no more than 250 words, along with a title, and your institution to Omar Jabary Salamanca (
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by November 14, 2015.
Sponsored by: Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers
