Paper short abstract:

Using Simone's concept of “people as infrastructures”, this paper attempts to examine how individuals and groups belonging to different classes, professions, and occupations engage in strategic networking for street animal rescue work, in urban spaces in India in precarious moments.

Paper long abstract:

Simone’s concept of “people as infrastructures” challenges the traditional notions of urban collective by highlighting how individuals and communities adapt and sustain social, and economic connections, particularly as they emerge through situational connections- often spontaneous and context-dependent. Simone characterized these networks of human activity as contingent on episodes of diverse “objects, spaces, persons, and practices” that come together momentarily. Simone’s work presents itself as a compelling analytical tool for understanding street animal rescue in urban India, where the formal state response to street animal welfare is often limited or inefficient, and empathy networks play a critical role in addressing gaps in care. These networks may be composed of the local feeder or voluntary care worker in the neighbourhood, the auto-rickshaw driver who ferries an injured dog who is unlikely to see this as part of their regular job, yet contributes to the empathy network by filling a vital gap left by the absence of institutional services such as veterinary ambulance, or the local pharmacy that supplies emergency medicine after hours, or the informal cleaner who helps sanitize makeshift shelters. None of them may be regular participants in animal welfare but these temporal connections reveal a critical aspect of urban life. By drawing on the lived experiences of individuals and communities who are part of these alliances, the paper is an attempt to articulate the challenges of urban animal welfare such as public hostilities, difficult resource mobilization, animal cruelty, and poor civic policies.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation explores women's cross-border trading practices in post-Soviet Russia, focusing on krutit'sya (circulate) as a complex logistical practice. Merging feminist studies with the anthropology of infrastructure, I emphasise embodied dimensions of social reproduction in times of crisis.

Paper long abstract:

The collapse of the Soviet Union triggered a wave of cross-border trading mobility, primarily among women seeking a living by transporting goods across international borders. This presentation explores the embodied practices of these women traders, highlighting the emic concept of krutit'sya (to move, circulate) as a masterful logistical practice. Krutit’sya, I show, encompasses the complex combination of factors that women shuttle traders take into account when deciding where to go, what to buy, when to invest, and how to keep the business running and the family afloat through both formal and informal channels. Studying practices of krutit'sya allows to, on the one hand, theorize the body as a location of human experience and political subjectivity, and, on the other hand, as an infrastructuring agent. Drawing on AbdouMaliq Simone’s (2004) concept of "people as infrastructures," I examine how these women navigate opportunities, risks and physical strains to sustain their livelihoods while also contributing to the broader reproduction of life in the crisis-ridden post-Soviet societies of the 1990s. Taking seriously the task of krutit'sya as an embodied practice, I shift Simone's framework from a broad notion of "people" to emphasize the role of bodies as the most intimate of spatial scales and a geo to study the complex effects of globalization and geopolitical shifts. Based on biographical interviews and market ethnographies, I integrate feminist studies with the anthropology of infrastructure to advance a body-as-infrastructure framework, shedding light on the gendered and embodied dimensions of trade in a predatory post-socialist environment.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on extensive fieldwork within a leading Chinese social media company, the paper reveals how various IT workers act as nodes within a complex information infrastructure that supports the distribution of user-generated content.

Paper long abstract:

This paper challenges the prevailing narrative that algorithms alone govern the distribution of user-generated content from social media databases to user interfaces. Drawing on extensive fieldwork within a leading Chinese social media company, it foregrounds the vast information infrastructure, diverse forms of informatic labor, and distinct work practices that collectively underpin content flow.

The study highlights three critical types of informatic labor: content moderators in Sichuan who manually delete “risky content,” engineers at headquarters who design algorithms to trace content as it moves across different departments, and in-house content editors in Beijing who manually correct algorithmic glitches. By examining these practitioners' various labor practices, the paper reveals how they act as nodes within a complex information infrastructure that supports the distribution of user-generated content.

Although these IT practitioners subtly influence content circulation through their own cultural preferences and company-assigned roles, their impact on moderation is conditioned by their interrelationships with other heterogeneous elements within the system, such as user flagging, risk-detection programs, media censorship, and more. By employing what I term backstage ethnography, this paper illustrates how infrastructures are formed by everyday practices, foregrounding the hidden labor they rely upon as well as their contingency on social structures.

Paper short abstract:

Urban coastlines have seen a turn towards nature as infrastructure, as hard defenses fail. I argue that this masks underlying functioning of humans as infrastructure that better explains vulnerability, opportunity, and habitability at the coast.

Paper long abstract:

Urban coastlines around the world have seen hard infrastructures failing, as sea levels rise, storms worsen, and sea walls deteriorate or collapse. One response has been the turn to nature-based solutions in the management of watery boundaries. This can involve the planting of mangroves and seagrasses, or letting salt water breach elsewhere to form new marshes and wetlands in attempts to relieve pressure. While research on the infrastructuring of nature is valuable, it has at times overlooked the precarious and ephemeral processes of urban coastal boundary making. This is especially the case given the uncertainty over future coastlines that makes intertidal planting highly speculative, with potentially increasing turbidity, eutrophication, ocean warming and acidification, as well as processes of coastal squeeze. In this context, green-blue infrastructures can seem as likely to fail as their harder counterparts.

In this presentation I argue that the turn towards green-blue infrastructure at the urban coast masks the underlying functioning of humans as infrastructure, in which vulnerability, opportunity and habitability continue through changes from concrete to plants. People make the coastline through improvisatory and adaptive practices, of which contemporary participation in nature-based infrastructural projects is just one part. At the same time, recognising humans as infrastructure can cast new light on ambivalent and partial participation in nature-based projects, where a politics of habitability rubs against expectations of future failing. This presentation draws on 18 months of ethnographic research on the south coast of England, as well as comparative preparation for research on the coast of Guyana.

Paper short abstract:

Human mobility has been formative in the arrangement of space, infrastructure, and governance of occupied Palestine. This paper explores the movement of borders, populations, and ideas into and around the West Bank using Palestinian and Israeli human infrastructures.

Paper long abstract:

Human mobility has been formative in the arrangement of space, infrastructure, and governance of the West Bank. Like road and internet infrastructures, the locations and flows of settlers and Palestinians throughout the region have had the effect of moving borders, populations, and ideas into and around the West Bank despite the numerous restrictions to mobility. In this paper I propose considering Israeli settlers and Palestinian refugees themselves as human infrastructures, facilitating the flow of people, goods, and ideas into the region, informed by each group’s relation to territory, identity, and ideology.

Human infrastructures have been defined, broadly, as groups of individuals united by a common goal whose “selves, situations, and bodies bear the responsibility for articulating different locations, resources, and stories into viable opportunities for everyday survival” (Simone 2009: 124). The ‘common goal’ is a significant feature of human infrastructures, with those who are thus united often referred to as a “critical mass” in the scholarship of human geographers (Lugo 2013; Nello-Deakin and Nikolaeva 2020). It is this notion of a critical mass that is especially useful in thinking of settlers and refugees as human infrastructures rather than merely as kin groups, migrant networks, or ethno-national communities. An infrastructural approach complicates conceptions about immobility, invisibility, and the nature of occupation as well as emphasising the role of human agency in the navigation of mobility in a region where it is strictly controlled.

Paper short abstract:

Formal property inheritance in Johannesburg relies on a human infrastructure of legal officials and professionals committed to post-apartheid access. Yet understanding the divergent commitments underlying such an infrastructure reveals how formalisation and its promised legal protections founder.

Paper long abstract:

During apartheid’s demise, who owned property in urban South Africa changed rapidly, as township houses were transferred to long-term black tenants who previously could not own. Soon, attention turned to the inheritance of these homes across generations. Under apartheid, property inheritance was one among many aspects of governance that excluded the black majority. As administration was deracialised, the system expanded rapidly to serve a new public. This paper explores the resulting field of legal administration as a public human infrastructure. Today, formal inheritance in Johannesburg relies on a city-wide public infrastructure of legal officials and professionals understood precisely as offering coordinated post-apartheid access. A distributed network of institutions extends beyond state officialdom to civic and for-profit services, with the aim of bringing the system ‘to the people’. Its public character implies shared values, shared availability and benefit, and a shared public experience of encounter and collective engagement. These features capture the aspirations of officials and many providers of non-state assistance, promising a coherent human infrastructure of legal procedure and assistance. But in practice, their realisation is far from straightforward. Increased public access occurs at normative interfaces – between the law and popular norms, and between civic and corporate notions of service – and it requires brokering and bridging work. A shared project of post-apartheid access coexists with different institutional agendas, and variable understandings and degrees of public obligation. Understanding the divergent and contradictory commitments underlying this human infrastructure of property inheritance reveals how formalisation and its promised legal protections founder.

Paper short abstract:

Environmentally displaced people along the banks of the Brahmaputra River in Assam, India navigate extreme precarity to access energy. The politics and impacts of navigating technological services from NGOs is analysed in this paper through the lens of gendered labour by “human infrastructures”.

Paper long abstract:

Precarity and material dispossession is a part of everyday life for people displaced by floods and riverbank erosion by the Brahmaputra River in Assam, India. As state and non-state agencies address challenges of natural disasters, emphasis is placed by these agencies on electricity access for internally displaced people. This raises questions about the politics and impacts of such efforts. What does it mean for environmental refugees to have access to infrastructure when they are cyclically displaced? How does electricity access mediate legitimacy in the eyes of the state that continuously questions the citizenship of certain people? In this temporality of crisis, how do community members situate themselves as “human infrastructure” to re-introduce electricity in their locality? And more importantly, what does it mean to perform illegible gendered labour by women to uphold generational aspirations and maintain social mobility?

In Tengaguri village, by the Brahmaputra, where seventy percent of the village has been lost to erosion, displaced people – Muslims with a colonial history of migration to Assam from present-day Bangladesh – narrate stories of dispossession and repossession in a dynamic flux. Dispossession transitions from earlier legitimate grid connections to improvised illegitimate hooking of new electric poles at present. Repossession entails negotiating with NGO representatives to build decentralised energy systems and maintaining those to “time trick” (Bear, 2016) the immediate future. Analyzing ethnographic material, gathered during a year-long fieldwork in Tengaguri, this paper discusses people’s interactions with electric materials at home and in communal spaces at the margins of the state.

Paper short abstract:

The paper explores the Rioni Valley Movement’s anti-dam protest that emerged in Georgia in 2020. It views the protest as a form of human infrastructure, serving as a communicative language for political sociality and a connective site in the context of left-behindness and post-social emptiness.

Paper long abstract:

In 2020, four residents of Rioni Valley laid the foundation for the largest environmental protests in post-Soviet Georgia. Two mothers and two sons, with the support of local people, gathered at the site of the planned Namakhvani dam project in the Rioni Valley, where a large orthodox cross was erected as a symbol of the anti-dam protest, marking the beginning of a continuous resistance for 554 days and nights.

The reference images of left-behind places brought by political and economic transformations can be traced in most post-socialist countries as a material and ideological result of capitalist development (Harvey 2006). Some authors describe those places as “emptiness” produced by capitalism after socialism and its subsequent abandonment (Dzenovska 2020). The dominant economic narrative sees remote areas as a host segment of large-scale projects “by assuming that peripheries are frontiers of empty space—uninhabited and ready to be exploited for the needs of global capital” (Gansauer et al. 2023).

The paper explores the formation of local forms of resistance in the “emptiness” through entangled social infrastructure, connections, and togetherness within the people and more than human worlds. By building on Lauren Berlant’s (2016) way of seeing infrastructure as the “living mediation of what organizes life: the lifeworld of structure,” I argue that the protest itself became the human infrastructure for the troubling times (2016) - the infrastructure of sociality, by creating the space for the (self)formation of the political subjectivities of the subalterns and more-than-human worlds, otherwise excluded from the "political."