Short Abstract

This panel invites empirically-grounded explorations of how infrastructure and materiality are understood and intertwined, and how these relations shape and reflect diverse processes of development.

Description

Infrastructures are often celebrated as engines of connection, development, and progress, yet they are also material expressions of power, inequality, and exclusion. This panel explores the materialities of infrastructure as both built environments and embodied experiences to ask how development takes shape: who builds, who maintains, and for whom does it matter? Infrastructures encompass not only the physical systems that enable movement, shelter, and circulation, but also the bodily labours, affects, and social relations through which they are inhabited, endured, and given meaning.

We invite empirically-grounded analyses from across disciplines that explore processes of development in diverse geographical contexts, engaging with broader understandings of what infrastructure is and does, how materiality and infrastructure intersect (or diverge), and how these relations shape and are shaped by development. We welcome contributions from both academics and activists that explore several interrelated questions including but not limited to: What forms of bodily labor, maintenance, and endurance keep infrastructures alive? How do promises of expansion and futurity obscure the material and human costs of development? And how are infrastructures lived differently across lines of class, caste, gender, race, or geography?

This Panel has 3 pending paper proposals.
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