Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes the transformative nature of working towards circular supply chains in architecture in Europe from an actor perspective. Changing the logistics of building materials means finding new ways between supply and demand by considering the input of labour, skills and knowledge.

Paper long abstract:

Transforming from a “linear” towards a “circular economy” is at the heart of many ongoing civil society initiatives that aim to diminish waste and treat natural resources more carefully. This paper analyzes the reuse of building materials in Europe from an actor perspective based on ethnographic fieldwork in a small reuse company in Vienna. Reusing building materials is still a niche phenomenon in the overall construction industry mainly due to the complicated logistics of shifting materials from demolition to construction site. While processes in architecture usually rely on the steady supply of new, standardized materials that seem to be endlessly available, the practice of reuse challenges the current capitalist-oriented market as it departs from what is available. Instead of being thrown on the landfill, wood and steel components, bricks, tiles and windows can be deconstructed, transported, and reintegrated into new buildings. In a practice of skillful urban mining, changing the logistics of building materials means finding new ways between supply and demand. This includes the search for valuable materials on a demolition site, the development of logistical infrastructures for transporting and storing materials and the integration of reused objects into the structure of a new building. Understanding the transformative nature of working towards reuse and circular supply chains in architecture involves considering the input of labour, skills and knowledge at different stages of the cycle. Rather than in the pricing of raw materials, value is created through services around the movement of materials and objects.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses ethnographically how businesses in Northern Italy find strategies to solve the logistical problems of recent resource shortages. Changing supply chains or rethinking material life cycles are addressed by adapting social relations and adjusting good practices.

Paper long abstract:

Covid 19, and recently the war in Ukraine, have shown the fragility of our global interdependence, with shortages of goods and raw materials never expected before. This period brings businesses to think about changes in their way of working and making use of resources. It also leads to a reconsideration of their supply chains, and to the local production of certain components no longer available on the global market.

In this paper, I address resource shortage and logistical challenges by drawing on different fieldwork experiences inside businesses in the Northern part of Italy. Firstly, based on ethnographic fieldwork in manufacturing companies in Emilia, I analyse how businesses try to be resilient and face up shortages through social relations and good practices. I especially investigate the relations they entertain with their local providers and clients, as well as with businesses from outside this area. Secondly, based on observations from ongoing fieldwork in the construction and demolition industry in Lombardy, I engage with the logistics and life cycle of construction materials, the ways in which they are being recycled, reused, or thrown away. A more circular supply chain is often difficult to implement. Energetic standards to meet often complicate the situation, and the effect of environmental policies and state subsidies push the construction sector but aggravates the situation of the scarcity of materials.

How can we use this crisis to rethink material resources and the reorganisation of work and value chains? I emphasize good practices, difficulties on the ground, and future possibilities.

Paper short abstract:

Biobanks, human-based biorepositories, are crucial in the contemporary biomedical research supply chains. This paper delves into biobankers calibrating practices around sample accumulation and the heterogeneous logics and ways of generating value as part of the knowledge and drugs economy.

Paper long abstract:

Contemporary biomedical research and drug development rely upon infrastructures such as biobanks, a type of biorepository, that collect, process, store, and distribute human-based biological samples and associated data for biomedical research. Biobanks are a crucial part of the biomedical supply chain. Since their formal establishment in the early 2000s, biobanks have drawn anthropologists’ attention regarding tissue commodification or ethical discussions on sample donation. However, much less attention and research revolve around the quotidian work of biobanks’ staff. This paper presents an ethnographic study in Spain with biobankers (understood as anyone working in a biobank), attending to their daily work and concerns. The study pivoted around the following staff concern: making biobanks worth maintaining public research infrastructures for the “scientific common good.” From this context, I will present how biobankers are invested in making biobanks worth maintaining, which requires reconfiguring biobanks’ logic and logistics. Sample accumulation is not only being displaced but also denotes malpractice. Biobanking logistics in Spain are turned upon facilitating dynamism, storing only “what is needed” and sharing but “not too much,” which requires calibration practices. Routinely fulfilling the deposits is being questioned, and what matters in biobanking transformed. The transformation of biobanking logistics and logic is challenging anchored meanings and imaginaries about cryopreservation and accumulation to produce biomedical knowledge. This study on biobanking serves to delve into an anthropology of biomedical infrastructures logistics while exploring the heterogeneous logics and ways of generating value as part of the knowledge and drugs economy.

Paper short abstract:

Focusing on the Southern Gas Corridor, a natural gas transit regime and logistical mega infrastructure that was recently completed between the Caspian Basin and the European Union, this paper identifies various geopolitical agenda and scale-making projects this energy corridor is to facilitate.

Paper long abstract:

Geopolitics has arguably made a recent comeback. With the recent invasion and occupation of the Ukraine by the Russian Federation, the geopolitics of energy and energy infrastructures, such as natural gas pipelines, have attrached reinvigorated interest from the joint perspectives of imagining a climate-resilient and sustainable energy future and their logistics. As all infrastructure, energy transport infrastructures tell important political stories about particular intentions in physical form. Cross-border natural gas pipelines that are built to promote interests that go beyond state borders and territories are considered geopolitical infrastructures par excellence. Focusing on the Southern Gas Corridor, a natural gas transit regime and logistical infrastructure that was recently completed between the Caspian Basin and the European Union, this paper identifies various geopolitical agenda and scale-making projects this energy corridor is to facilitate. It argues for an anthropological approach to studies of geopolitics and logistical infrastructures by recalibrating theory-building and ethnographic scope to the future-making efforts of elite actors at the interstices of cross-border governance, sovereignty, and statecraft by transnational infrastructural means.

Paper short abstract:

Unbuilt infrastructures in Southeast Asia offer a different understanding to Singapore's national development. Reading the rumors of Kra Canal and S. Rajaratnam's Global City speech, this paper untangles notions of unbuilt/planned, failure/insecurity to study the narratives of globalization.

Paper long abstract:

The oft-proposed Kra Canal is a massive construction project that seeks to transform the Kra Isthmus in Thailand into a waterway that would connect the Indian Ocean with the South China Sea, and onwards to the Pacific Ocean. The cutting of the isthmus is seen as an alternative to the Straits of Malacca, a waterway that holds the traffic of Singapore’s global trade. Despite already proven to be unprofitable, unfeasible, and ecologically destructive, it still continues to be recognized and pitched as a possible solution to the crisis impeding global maritime trade. The “failure” of the Kra Canal has always been painted by its proponents as the lack of available technology or resources, but this narrative elides the political and social explanations of its difficulty.

Drawing on Carse et al and Rankin’s ideas on unbuilt infrastructures and zombie projects, the Kra Canal offers a glimpse into the life of an infrastructural fantasy and how it shapes colonial and nationalist insecurity. A narrative on the speculation about “nonsense” and a country with no resources (Rajaratnam, 1972), as well as a meditation on unbuilt or unrealized infrastructures (Carse et al, 2020; Rankin, 2017) and oceanic geographies (Amrith, 2015; Khalili; 2020), this paper analyses the unlikely confluence between disparate discourses of the rumors of the Kra Canal and Singapore’s national development strategy of Global City. Thus, the Kra Canal, when read as a shadow history, considers how infrastructural vulnerability is intertwined with narratives of globalization and visions for nation building in Southeast Asia.