[Commlist] CFP: (Infra)Structures

*CALL FOR PAPERS*

*4 - 5 June 2020*

Centre for Postdigital Cultures annual conference

Coventry University, UK


CONFIRMED SPEAKERS:

*Kreider + O'Leary***

***Daphne Dragona***

***Daniel Rourke*

*
*

‘Infrastructure’ has emerged in recent years as the new academic 
buzzword. From the so-called ‘infrastructural turn’ in urban and 
architectural studies, the emergence of media infrastructure theory, to 
formation of new disciplinary discourses in the nascent critical 
infrastructural studies, an interest in infrastructural thinking has 
been widespread. Alan Liu has gone so far as to suggest that 
“‘infrastructure’ today can … give us the same kind of general purchase 
on social complexity that Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, and others 
sought when they reached for their all-purpose word, ‘culture.’”


What all these approaches to infrastructures have in common is an 
understanding of infrastructure as a structure of often unremarked power 
and a system for instituting, distributing, maintaining, controlling 
but, perhaps also, resisting socio-political, economic and technological 
worlds. In other words, to notice infrastructures is to pay attention to 
material and immaterial systems which tend to be unobtrusively 
invisible, boring and rarely scrutinised, but always present and always 
inevitably determining how and why we are in society.


This conference takes interest in infrastructures as an invisible system 
of meaning-making and a mode of structuring people and knowledge, in the 
institutional contexts and conditions of this structuring, as well as in 
possible models of intervening in these very structures. By doing so, we 
hope to interrogate the potential of making infrastructure visible – 
remarkable – as a means of speaking to power. We are interested in 
exploring what new ways of understanding, developing, reconfiguring or 
hacking infrastructures might be possible if we focus on their radical 
potential. That is, we are not interested in infrastructural hegemonies, 
but rather in /infra*/-structures in and for troubled times (to borrow 
from Lauren Berlant), and their counter-cultural capacity to create 
knowledges of, and practices for, resistance and structural 
transformation. By focusing on infra/counter/contra structures – on the 
infrared, infrathin (of) infrastructures – we hope to think about 
(infra)structure as a space ripe for critical intervention and a 
condition for cooperation, commoning and practices of collective care.


The Centre for Postdigital Cultures invites contributions to its third 
annual conference which respond to this take on (infra)structures. We 
welcome conference papers as well as performances, readings, screenings, 
exhibitions or experimental contributions to the programme.


Please submit proposals for *20-minute *presentations, including:

 1. title
 2. 250-word abstract
 3. 100-word bio
      to (FAH-infra_structures2020 /at/ coventry.ac.uk)
by *1 March 2020*.

Notifications of acceptance will be circulated by mid-March.






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