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Paper short abstract

This paper explores how a protest at the world's largest coal exporting port enabled the contradicting and partial repurposing of infrastructure to contest development trajectories. The paper foregrounds the scalar challenges of contesting development through global energy infrastructure.

Paper long abstract

Intertwined with the plurality of experiences associated with material infrastructures are the multiple meanings infrastructure signifies. From planned spectacles of modernity to sites of abandoned promises of development, it is well known that similar to the experience of infrastructure, the meanings associated with infrastructures are multiple, contingent, contradicting and partial (Appel et al., 2018). Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted at a Rising Tide’s “protestival” at the port of Newcastle this paper explores how infrastructure is utilised as a boundary object by which the meanings of infrastructure are geographically rescaled as political projects are glocalised (Swyngdouw, 2004). Altough the protest is directed towards contesting the future of the port’s operations, and the wider Australian coal assemblage which it forms part of, the interviews I conducted with participants reflected only a partial interest in contesting the port or the development of a post-coal port. Rather, the contestations are justified through contingent, multi-scale political agendas, ranging from stopping techno-capitalism to contesting mining operations in national parks. Despite these disparate agendas and perceptions, the blocking of the port facilitates the formation of new connections as different groups gathered on, or next to, the port over the five days of the “protestival”. As such the port becomes more than a critical infrastructure of coal exports (and a site of development contestation), it facilitates the creation of an affective infrastructure. This affective infrastructure is marked by social discontent, hope and uncertainty and has little to do with the material and discursive development promised at the port.