The session recording will be archived on the site until June 25th, 2023

This session was streamed but not recorded

Curated Track: 

Description:

Recent scholarship on the infrastructural lives of cities has attended to infrastructure’s material, economic and political dimensions, deepening our understanding of the re/configuration of social power in urban places. Research in urban political ecology has broadened the connections between human-environment geography and infrastructure studies, by offering insights into embodied experiences and encounters with nature that are shaped by infrastructure, and re-shaped, in turn.
While infrastructure’s materiality is usually central to explorations of infrastructure, geographers have given infrastructure’s temporality far less attention, despite compelling arguments that infrastructure’s phases are essential to understanding infrastructural configurations. Lived experiences of infrastructure, affective responses, the mobilization of labor and care, and the reworking of the citizenship contract are some of the themes reframed by geographers through the lens of infrastructure’s life phases over time.

In this session, we look to conceptualizations of infrastructure’s dynamic materiality that can inform research at the nexus of power-infrastructure-environment, writ large. We hope to foster a discussion about how engagement with phases of decay, maintenance, repurposing and repair can shed light on governance, gender relations and social movements in cities around the world.

Session themes may include, but are not limited to:
-Embodied and affective experiences of infrastructural labor, over infrastructure’s lifecourse;
-Relationships between materialities and temporalities of urban infrastructure;
-How the construction, maintenance, repair and neglect of infrastructure transforms citizen-state relationships over time;
-Temporalities of infrastructural disruption, differentiated citizenship, discontent, and action;
-How different actors and communities navigate and contest infrastructure-in-flux

References:
Anand, N. (2017). Hydraulic City: Water and the infrastructures of citizenship in Mumbai. Duke University Press.
Arefin, M.R. (2019). Infrastructural Discontent in the Sanitary City: Waste, Revolt, and Repression in Cairo. Antipode, 51(4): 1057-1078.
Desai, R., McFarlane, C., & Graham, S. (2015). The Politics of open defecation: Informality, body, and infrastructure in Mumbai. Antipode, 47(1), 98–120.
Doshi, S. (2017). Embodied urban political ecology: five propositions. Area, 49(1), 125–128.
Farhana Sultana (2020) Embodied Intersectionalities of Urban Citizenship: Water, Infrastructure, and Gender in the Global South, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 110:5, 1407-1424.
Lemanski, C. (2020). Infrastructural citizenship: The everyday citizenships of adapting and/or destroying public infrastructure in Cape Town, South Africa. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 45(3): 589-605.
Prouse, C. (2021). Affective registers of favela infrastructure in Rio de Janeiro, Social & Cultural Geography, Published Online, Dec 4: https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2021.2010760
Ramakrishnan, K., O’Reilly, K., & Budds, J. (2021). Between decay and repair: Embodied experiences of infrastructure’s materiality. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 4(3), 669–673.
Truelove, Y. (2016). Incongruent Waterworlds: Situating the Everyday Practices and Power of Water in Delhi. South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 14(November), 1–25.
Truelove, Y. & Cornea, N. (2021). Rethinking urban environmental and infrastructural governance in the everyday: Perspectives from and of the global South. Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, 39(2), 231-246.
Wittmer, J. (2022). Dirty work in the clean city: An embodied urban political ecology of women informal recyclers’ work in the ‘clean city’. Environment & Planning E: Nature & Space, Published online, May 17: https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486221102374

Non-Presenting Participants