[Commlist] CFP EUGEO 2019: De-centring Infrastructures

*CFP: De-centring Infrastructures*
EUGEO 2019, May 15–18, Galway, Ireland

Infrastructure enables and disables the movement of goods, people and 
ideas. Yet in most contexts, infrastructures evade notice and 
recognition, buried underground or backgrounded into the mundanity of 
day-to-day life (Star 1999). This paradox has given rise to a body of 
scholarship attuned to materialities, labours, practices and relations 
ignored by dominant technoscientific discourses and modes of production. 
Infrastructure studies is now a significant area of study, and has 
generated concepts, methodologies and debates across disciplinary 
divides (Anand, Gupta, and Appel 2018). In science and technology 
studies, it has helped unearth the codes and categories that shape and 
define social relations (Bowker and Star 1999). In anthropology and 
media studies, infrastructure has become an empirical focus and 
conceptual tool for exploring the imbrications of the technical and the 
natural (Larkin 2013; Peters 2015), and the citizen and the state (Anand 
2017). Urban geographers have long used the term to explore the 
spatially distributed and uneven processes of urban metabolism (Gandy 
2003), as well as questions of public utility access, maintenance and 
governance (Graham and Marvin 2001). Recently, imaginaries of 
Eurocentric, liberal modernity have been challenged through a 
re-thinking of postcolonial and decolonial infrastructures and urbanisms 
(Roy 2015; McFarlane, Silver, and Truelove 2016).

For this session, we hope to build on this scholarship by inviting 
papers that work with and through 'infrastructure' as a concept that 
de-centres humanist accounts of progress and social change, and the 
familiar sites and objects of academic research. We ask:

  * How does infrastructure brace society, technology and nature in ways
    that challenge linear, anthropocentric visions of history and
    development?
  * How do the spatialities and temporalities of infrastructure make
    evident new political ecologies of water, energy, information,
    toxicity, and climate change?
  * What does infrastructure allow us to see and say about the
    limitations of, and challenges for, activist politics and organising?
  * What might it mean to de-centre our research on infrastructures of
    and for the Global North, the city and the human?
  * How might we pursue new interdisciplinary insights and connections
    that build upon, but also challenge, the assumptions of
    infrastructure studies?

We welcome papers of an empirical and theoretical nature that seek to 
engage with these issues, debates and literatures in an open but 
provocative manner. Please send your title and 250 word abstract by 
*January 21, 2019* to Jim White ((jmerrick /at/ tcd.ie) 
<mailto:(jmerrick /at/ tcd.ie)>), Patrick Bresnihan ((pbresnih /at/ tcd.ie) 
<mailto:(pbresnih /at/ tcd.ie)>) or Arielle Hesse ((ahesse /at/ tcd.ie) 
<mailto:(ahesse /at/ tcd.ie)>), of the WISDOM project <http://waterschemes.ie>.

*References*

  * Anand, Nikhil. (2017). /Hydraulic city: Water and the
    infrastructures of citizenship in Mumbai/. Durham and London: Duke
    University Press.
  * Anand, Nikhil, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel, eds. (2018). /The
    Promise of Infrastructure/. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
  * Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star. (1999). /Sorting Things
    Out: Classification and Its Consequences/. Cambridge and London: The
    MIT Press.
  * Gandy, Matthew. (2003). /Concrete and Clay: Reworking nature in New
    York City/. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press.
  * Graham, Stephen, and Simon Marvin. (2001). /Splintering Urbanism:
    Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban
    Condition/. London: Routledge.
  * Larkin, Brian. (2013). "The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure."
    /Annual Review of Anthropology/, 42: 328–43.
  * McFarlane, Colin, Jonathan Silver, and Yaffa Truelove. (2016).
    "Cities Within Cities: Intra-Urban Comparison of Infrastructure in
    Mumbai, Delhi and Cape Town." /Urban Geography/, 38 (9): 1393–1417.
  * Peters, John Durham. (2015). Infrastructuralism: Media as Traffic
    between Nature and Culture. In Marion Näser-Lather and Christoph
    Neubert, eds. /Traffic: Media as Infrastructures and Cultural
    Practices/. Leiden: Brill|Rodopi, 31–49.
  * Roy, Ananya. (2015). "What Is Urban About Critical Urban Theory?"
    /Urban Geography/, 37 (6): 810–823.
  * Star, Susan Leigh. (1999). "The Ethnography of Infrastructure."
    /American Behavioral Scientist/, 43 (3): 377–391.


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