Infrastructural Matters: What counts as infrastructure in America?

Keywords: infrastructure, violence, justice, class, race, gender, materialism
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 35

Abstract

What’s the matter with infrastructure in America? Who gets to claim what infrastructure is, and what counts as infrastructure, for that matter? What is infrastructural justice, and how do we get there? While debates around infrastructure access and infrastructural finance circulate in national headlines and Congressional deliberations, another fundamental set of questions remains unanswered – who decides what counts as infrastructure?; for whom are infrastructures funded and developed?; and at what costs are infrastructures built, repaired, or neglected? Taking these questions as a starting point of both inquiry and analysis, this paper works to conceptualize a social imaginary of American infrastructure which can then be articulated, leveraged, and mobilized for civic infrastructural action across the nation.

Beginning with the question what counts as infrastructure in America, the presentation will follow a Socratic methodology and ask co-panelists and the audience to rethink a critical and national infrastructural imaginary together. Framed by an historical materialist analytic that attends to infrastructural gaps on the intersectional grounds of class, race, and gender, this presentation also takes the contemporary historical moment as both a lens and an opportunity to start transforming infrastructural violence into infrastructural justice across America.