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- Convenors:
-
Ognjen Kojanić
(Czech Academy of Sciences)
Nikolaos Olma (University of the Aegean)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Networks:
- Network Panel
Short Abstract
Infrastructures are socio-technical assemblages often presented as neutral solutions for sustaining the flows of goods, information, and people. This panel proposes to think of infrastructural polarizations as consequential processes where oppositions are staged, reproduced, and sometimes unsettled.
Long Abstract
Infrastructures are socio-technical assemblages that are often presented as neutral solutions for sustaining the flows of goods, information, and people. Yet more than simply material backbones of modernity, they are also political projects that provide fertile grounds for various kinds of polarizations. The imaginaries of future development or past glory that cluster around infrastructural systems are often contested by alternative visions. From highways that divide urban neighborhoods, to digital infrastructures that privilege some voices while silencing others, to energy grids and water systems entangled in resource struggles, infrastructures operate as dynamic arenas where tensions are enacted, risks are reinterpreted, and promises for more just futures emerge.
This panel proposes to think of infrastructural polarizations as consequential processes where oppositions are staged, reproduced, and sometimes unsettled. Infrastructures can materialize boundaries of wealth and poverty, belonging and exclusion, care and neglect, or enable novel solidarities, tactical collaborations, and forms of resistance. Such polarizations frequently entail a complex dialogue of regimes of valuation or estimation, conflicting environmental priorities, competing aesthetic values, and diverging views of acceptable risks.
We invite papers that examine various facets of infrastructural polarizations, including but not limited to:
a) political-economic (e.g., polarizations on future economic trajectories shaped by infrastructural development);
b) environmental (e.g., conflicts surrounding the “green transition” from fossil fuels to renewable energy);
c) aesthetic (e.g., debates over the aesthetic qualities of infrastructure);
d) public health (e.g., contestations regarding the systemic risks produced or amplified by large-scale infrastructures).
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
This paper examines medical deserts in rural Serbia as a slow process of infrastructural erosion. As care and public transport withdraw toward urban centers, women’s reproductive healthcare becomes fragmented, improvised, and increasingly reliant on informal support.
Paper long abstract
“Medical deserts” refer to regions where healthcare services are technically accessible but, in practice, remain insufficient or inaccessible. Clinics, staff, pharmacies, and transport connections thin out, and care becomes harder to reach, less continuous, and more uncertain. This paper approaches medical deserts in rural Serbia as a slow, cumulative process of infrastructural erosion. We trace how village-based care and mobility links withdraw toward larger health centers, shifting women’s reproductive healthcare into a terrain of improvisation and informality.
Based on multimodal ethnography in villages in Northern Banat and Zaječar catchment, the analysis follows women across space and time through narrative accounts, participatory micro-mapping of routes to care, and traces of everyday logistics. We show how “universal” entitlements diverge from lived access, as irregular transport and long waiting times turn routine care into all-day undertakings, deter prevention, and, through disrespectful or non-consented encounters, erode trust and recalibrate women’s expectations of care.
Conceptually, we argue that medical deserts are spatially, organizationally, and socially produced, and that they operate as infrastructural polarizations between center and periphery, formal systems and informal “patchwork” support, institutional legibility and women’s narrative evidence. We demonstrate that these deserts are not empty, but provisionally sustained by fragile counter-infrastructures of kin, neighbors, and trusted clinicians, even as responsibility for continuity and safety is increasingly redistributed onto households.
Reading these dynamics through necropolitical optics, we suggest that decisions about availability, continuity, and quality of care shape differential exposure to risk, pain, and abandonment, while also generating everyday tactics of endurance and solidarity.
Paper short abstract
The paper examines how the internal divisions between the residents of the Wawer district of Warsaw become visible and are reproduced through infrastructure, as well as how the local government’s lack of dialogue while shaping infrastructure unites the residents in their perceived lack of agency.
Paper long abstract
Based on two year long fieldwork, this paper examines infrastructure in the Wawer district of Warsaw as the means of understanding the polarization of the district’s residents. The railway tracks are viewed as the dividing line between the former summer resorts and the former fields, while the invisible infrastructure of waterworks and sewage systems showcase and reproduce the present divisions between the residents. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theories of capital and habitus, the way in which the residents view and experience infrastructures is examined to showcase the historically shaped division of the district, as well as the way in which those divisions are negotiated and viewed today. Additionally, the perceived lack of agency, which unites the district’s polarized residents, is examined through their interactions with infrastructure – contrasted with the local government’s active shaping of the district’s infrastructure, without dialogue with the residents.
Paper short abstract
This paper discusses how water infrastructure in the U.S., by fusing political power with economic sensibilities, operationalizes processes of social exclusion. To confront infrastructural violence and empower impacted communities, we need to reimagine the ways in which water is distributed.
Paper long abstract
In the U.S., as in many societies, political polarization tends to unfold along lines of access to resources and the infrastructures delivering them. Against the backdrop of the country’s long history of racial segregation, this paper discusses how water infrastructure in the U.S. functions as a form of state control that operationalizes processes of social marginalization and exclusion. While in the past, much scholarly attention focused on the practice of denying Black neighborhoods equal access to water, this presentation examines how water infrastructure is not only a mechanism of political power but is also infused with economic sensibilities. It details how water has increasingly become unaffordable to many Black Americans, posing a threat to public health, human dignity, and economic opportunity in Black communities. By highlighting how technical issues, such as failing pipes, rate hikes, and water contamination, are directly linked to larger processes of economic disinvestment, water privatization, and climate change, this paper reveals the structural dimension of water unaffordability. From here, the presentation attempts a turn that invites us to think more deeply about the relational nature of water infrastructure and the promises it holds for social change work. Taking a cue from the work of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Theory of Water, 2025), I suggest a more poetic reading—conceiving of water as connector, sustainer of life, and force of renewal—to help us imagine new ways in which water could flow that promote empowerment and participation of impacted community members in water decision-making.
Paper short abstract
Bucharest’s district heating system, once a pillar of socialist welfare, now endures in a state of managed decay. Tracing everyday responses to breakdown, this paper shows how failures redistribute risk, shape social life, and produce new forms of urban infrastructural polarization.
Paper long abstract
Bucharest’s district heating (DH) system, the largest in the EU, stands as a monumental legacy of socialist urban planning: a centralized, state-managed infrastructure designed to ensure universal access to hot water and heating. Today, however, it has become a site of profound infrastructural polarizations, as the promise of universal provision collides with chronic breakdowns and prolonged uncertainty. Following decades of disinvestment and fragmented governance, the network persists in a condition of managed decay, marked by corroded pipes and recurrent outages.
This paper traces how breakdowns in the DH system create sites of contestatios within which responsibility and risk are unevenly distributed. Residents respond to interruptions by reshaping domestic routines, renegotiating social ties, and adapting their bodies to fluctuating temperatures. In contrast, municipal authorities interpret breakdowns through technical lenses, focusing on energy losses and compliance with EU decarbonisation goals. These divergent regimes of valuation reveal a growing rift between lived experience and institutional priorities.
I argue that the failures of Bucharest’s DH system actively produce new forms of polarization: between ideals of universal service and realities of selective provision, between embodied needs and infrastructural neglect, and between socialist-era expectations of welfare and market-driven, supranational modes of governance. Rather than a linear narrative of transition, the system endures through patchwork repairs, affective attachments, and unequal capacities to buffer failure. By centering heat as a material and affective force in urban life, this paper contributes to anthropological debates on energy futures in post-socialist Europe.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines the everyday practices of sewer work in Delhi. Foregrounding workers' daily repair work that sustains the sewage system, I make the case for centering 'work' in infrastructure studies in order to better examine the invisibilisations & polarisations undergirding these systems.
Paper long abstract
The overarching questions guiding this paper are: how are large-scale urban infrastructures made functional on a day-to-day basis? Whose bodies and labour get mobilised in the management of essential urban services? How are infrastructural risks and toxicities distributed?
Drawing from my year-long ethnographic study of sewage work and infrastructure in Delhi, India, this paper examines the everyday practices of sewer work in the city. It discusses the range of tasks that constitute this work; the local tools and equipment considered essential to this work; the skills, embodied knowledge, and sensory cues that workers rely on as they undertake work that is ‘dirty’, risky, and hazardous; and, how this work continues to rely on manual labour despite reforms – a telling sign of how ‘modern’ urban infrastructures are undergirded by caste-based manual labour, made more precarious under conditions of contemporary capitalism.
Tracing these routines of sewer work, I highlight how workers’ everyday repair and maintenance work is essential to unclog the blockages in the city’s sewage infrastructure. Further, engaging with workers’ narratives on work, and the skills and techniques that it demands, I discuss how workers – while closely aware of the devaluation of sewer work – also contest this devaluing. Unpacking the sewage system at the level of everyday practices and narratives of work, I argue that re-centering ‘work’ in the study of infrastructures foregrounds the labour of historically invisibilised workers, while also allowing an examination of the relations and polarisations – of caste, capital, contractualisation – greasing those infrastructures.
Paper short abstract
Taking inspiration from China Miéville’s The City & The City, in this paper I analyse how socio-economic and political polarisations structure perception, responsibility, and the everyday life in Taranto, a southern Italian city home to one of Europe’s largest and most polluting steel plants.
Paper long abstract
In The City & The City, China Miéville imagines two cities occupying the same physical space. Their streets overlap and their inhabitants pass each other daily, yet citizens are trained to “unsee” the other city, to actively not perceive what is materially present. This speculative device is about the governance of perception: how power organises what counts as reality. Drawing on Miéville, in this paper I analyse how socio-economic and political polarisations structure perception, responsibility and everyday life in Taranto, southern Italy, home to one of Europe’s largest and most polluting steel plants.
Known as the “city of two seas,” Taranto’s classical heritage and touristic imaginaries coexist with an industrial landscape marked by toxic emissions, contaminated soil, and elevated mortality. These are not separate zones but overlapping worlds layered onto the same air, streets, and bodies. I argue that this coexistence is sustained through politically engineered regimes of (un)seeing tied to the ex-ILVA plant. Framed by the state as economically indispensable, the plant is embedded in narratives of national productivity and employment. Legal exceptions, stalled remediation, risk calculations and technocratic expertise have often minimised environmental and health harms: unfortunate side effects of industrial modernity. However, this regime is continually contested: parents’ groups, environmental movements and civil society organisations “breach” official narratives through popular epidemiology, legal actions, protests and testimony, forcing toxicity into view. Between these positions, many residents inhabit a tense middle ground shaped by dependence on industrial work, where unseeing risk becomes an everyday practice of survival.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines digital infrastructures in Yaounde, Cameroon, and how these influence economic trajectories of women fashion traders
Paper long abstract
Young Cameroonian women fashion traders in Yaoundé use WhatsApp and Facebook networks to organise import and export. These networks—and therefore their trade—rely on digital infrastructure. One of the major challenges they face is what they describe as “réseau dérangé”—an unstable or malfunctioning internet connection. Government efforts to upgrade digital infrastructure are often undermined by state-imposed internet slowdowns or shutdowns in certain areas.
Despite these constraints, digital infrastructure has polarised the economic trajectories of Cameroonian women fashion traders. It has enabled the rise of “fast fashion” imports from China versus France or Turkey, as was previously the case. This paper asks how young women’s economic trajectories toward a country they consider to produce lower-quality goods are produced and sustained, even when the internet remains réseau dérangé.
To address this question, I analyse how digital infrastructure—especially 4G internet, but also new port developments—reshapes the economic trajectories of female fashion traders by enabling what I call “scales of exchange" drawing on Tsing’s concept of non-scalability, Ferguson’s notion of a rightful share, and Piot’s spheres of exchange. Whereas trade trajectories under conditions of limited internet connectivity relied heavily on human infrastructure—such as trust and social networks—recent digital infrastructure projects increasingly digitalise and polarise this human infrastructure. This process densifies scales of exchange even as internet connectivity remains unstable and infrastructure upgrades themselves remain uneven and contested. In doing so, these scales of exchange generate new hierarchies through which the economic trajectories of young women fashion traders become further polarised.
Paper short abstract
Elephant translocation in Malaysia is a conservation infrastructure that polarizes landscapes of risk and belonging. Translocated “government elephants” become rogue infrastructural elements: living extensions of the apparatus whose movements both enact and unsettle partitions that contain wildness.
Paper long abstract
Conservation infrastructures are often framed as neutral solutions to environmental conflict, yet they routinely generate polarization by redistributing risk and belonging. This paper examines elephant translocation in Peninsular Malaysia as one such conservation infrastructure, staging polarizations through forced displacement of elephants, classificatory sorting, and territorial zoning. Elephants deemed “rogue” in human-designated zones are tranquilized, trucked, GPS-collared, and relocated to protected habitat where they ostensibly “belong”—territories also home to Jahai Indigenous communities of the Thai-Malaysian borderland. In the wake of these translocations, Jahai report being increasingly menaced by gajah kerajaan—“the government’s elephants”—which raid gardens and unsettle village life. Some speculate these elephants come from zoos, noting their strange ease around humans, unlike familiar local herds that can be spoken to and warded off. Such distinctions show how conservation infrastructure produces translocated elephants as infrastructural elements of the state: living instruments through which conservation attempts to stabilize the boundary between wildness and settlement, drawing on inherited infrastructures of mobility control and legibility forged through counterinsurgency.
Yet elephants continually transgress the routes and partitions meant to contain them. Through their unpredictable mobility, the government’s elephants become “rogue infrastructures” (Kim 2016): animate extensions of the conservation apparatus whose movements and effects both enact and exceed design, exposing the limits of infrastructural ordering. Wildness thus emerges not as a condition to be enclosed, but as a volatile effect of the infrastructures built to govern it.
Paper short abstract
Bitcoin in Kenya operates as an infrastructure through which imaginaries of value, future and economies of affection are produced, sustained and contested. These imaginations are shaped by histories of debt, dependencies, austerity, unemployment, class, corruption, and possibilities of repair.
Paper long abstract
Infrastructures are often viewed as technical systems that enable circulation, inclusion, and connectivity (Larkin 2013). Within contemporary debates on digital financial infrastructure, Bitcoin is commonly approached through its technical architecture, decentralisation, cryptography, and trustlessness (Nakamoto 2008; Maurer et al. 2013). In anthropology, Bitcoin is framed through polarised ideological lenses, from libertarian-right-wing imaginaries of monetary autonomy to left-leaning communitarian visions of collective self-provisioning beyond state (Golumbia 2016; Swartz 2018; Shapiro 2025). While such polarisations are well documented in Euro-America, in the Global South they take more heterogeneous and context-specific forms.
Drawing on ethnographic research with Bitcoin communities in Kenya, this paper argues that digital financial infrastructures operate as temporary spaces in which imaginaries, risks, and regimes of value are produced, negotiated, and contested. Focusing on Bitcoin as a socio-technical infrastructure, the paper traces how it is entangled in struggles over economic sovereignty, class mobility, and economies of affection under conditions of austerity, inflation, and youth unemployment.
The paper follows the social life of Bitcoin across Kenya’s 2024 Gen Z protests, community-based savings groups, and the incorporation of Kenyan Bitcoin initiatives into transnational philanthropic networks. It shows how Bitcoin functions as a technology of imagination through which futures are anticipated and rendered thinkable. These imaginaries are sustained through technical narratives, symbolisms, rituals, and collective practices that give Bitcoin meaning amid persistent economic uncertainty. While Bitcoin enables imaginaries of autonomy and resistance to state authority and global financial institutions such as the IMF, it simultaneously reproduces colonialities, class, and donor dependencies.
Paper short abstract
This paper takes to energy transitions as infrastructural changes within large socio-technical systems. It argues with reference to consistency theory and anthropological and philosophical positions, that ambivalence and ambiguity allow us to better understand infrastructural polarizations.
Paper long abstract
Nature vs climate, quickly scaling up vs slower systemic changes, socializing the costs while privatizing the profits, lithium vs coal mining – these are but some aspects of ambiguity that are inherent in energy transitions. What should be a straight forward process to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is rather one of pondering and compromise, of advancement and backlash, of new sacrifices and new opportunities. Disentangling the economic, environmental and political layers of energy transitions – drawing on ethnographic research that compares India, Germany and Australia – this paper argues that this ambiguity can lead to ambivalence. With reference to consistency theory, and anthropological and philosophical positions on ambivalence and ambiguity (Alimardanian and Heffernan 2024; Jovanovic 2016), I propose that polarized infrastructure has roots in ambivalence. While ambiguity is not only an obstacle to clarity, but has productive potential, ambivalence is hard to bear when consistency is what humans strive for. They are but two important, interrelated aspects of contemporary conflict that allow us to better understand infrastructural polarizations.
Paper short abstract
Focusing on Lula, Sardinia, this paper shows how the Einstein Telescope, even before construction, reorganize land, authority, and expectations, turning a global scientific infrastructure into a contested arena where local futures are imagined, claimed or unevenly distributed.
Paper long abstract
The proposed Einstein Telescope in Lula, Sardinia, shows the political and territorial dynamics through which mega-science projects reconfigure space, authority, and future imaginaries. Post–Cold War mega-science infrastructures (Baneke 2019) are not merely technical enterprises but geopolitical and governmental projects that mobilize national prestige, scientific diplomacy, and territorial governance, activating profound material and semiotic transformations in host regions. In Lula, a small village marked by depopulation, pastoral decline, and a disused mining heritage, the telescope is promoted as an opportunity for development, global recognition, and scientific leadership. At the same time, it becomes a site of infrastructural polarization, where state interests, scientific institutions, and local communities confront each other through competing narratives of progress and territorial value. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork among shepherds, ex-miners, scientists, and institutions, the paper analyzes how the project shapes imaginaries of the future, long before any material construction begins. Technoscientific and political discourses frame the telescope as neutral, inevitable, and universally beneficial, reproducing what Velho et al. (2024) describe as a dislocated and “nowhere” gaze. In constrast, local experiences are shaped by suspicion, attachment to place, and a diffuse sense of disorientation (De Martino 2023) in the face of transformations perceived as imposed from else where. By focusing on an infrastructure that remains largely imagined, the paper shows how infrastructural polarizations are enacted through political anticipation, competing regimes of authority, and struggles over who gets to define the future of a territory.
Paper short abstract
Considering the potential for infrastructural projects to generate polarising as well as ambivalent responses, in this paper I explore some of the social and moral complexities emerging from local engagements with renewable energy projects in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland.
Paper long abstract
Like other windswept regions around Scotland, the Outer Hebrides have become prime sites for proposed renewable energy infrastructure. In recent decades, wind energy projects have taken on a range of forms in this region, with multinational and foreign-owned commercial projects being developed alongside community-owned ones. However, recent developments in UK government strategy and net zero targets have accelerated plans to develop the energy sector in the region, leading to the rapid proliferation of proposals for industrial-scale wind power projects that prioritise multinational and foreign-owned ventures, and risk sidelining the budding and increasingly vital community energy sector. In a mostly rural archipelago known for its significant scenic, environmental, archaeological, and socio-cultural heritage – but threatened by depopulation, economic fragility, and limited job opportunities – the prospect of exponential growth in wind power projects has garnered mixed reactions. As I heard often during my fieldwork in the Outer Hebrides, this has become ‘an emotional topic’.
Foregrounding the potential for infrastructural projects to generate polarising as well as ambivalent responses, in this paper I explore some of the social and moral complexities emerging from local engagements with renewable energy projects in the Outer Hebrides. Considering local reactions to externally proposed projects, as well as islanders’ role in establishing community-owned energy infrastructures, I suggest the importance of foregrounding not only conflicting views, but also ambivalence and ambiguity. Doing so while considering perceptions of local pasts also reveals how certain histories shape visions of possible futures in rapidly changing landscapes of energy generation.
Paper short abstract
This paper suggests revisiting polarisation by exploring the generative notion of ambivalence in relation to infrastructural futures. It draws on ethnographic research in La Hague, France, a narrow peninsula hosting a controversial nuclear fuel reprocessing site and a nuclear waste storage facility.
Paper long abstract
The French peninsula of La Hague has long been defined by nuclear infrastructures, namely a nuclear fuel reprocessing site and a waste storage facility built in the 1960s. These installations have shaped and been shaped by local livelihoods, co-existing alongside agriculture, tourism and the cultural and heritage sector. Recently, and in the context of a so-called nuclear renaissance, the reprocessing site has been officially marked out for potential upgrading and extension. Growing critical voices interrogate the continued dependency of La Hague’s socio-economic landscape on the nuclear industry, drawing attention not only to the complexity of managing nuclear waste but also searching for alternative environmental and economic futures for the peninsula.
Despite seemingly fundamental and existential disagreements about the infrastructures, people are closely and intimately tied to them and to each other, as they live and shape the area together. In the local peninsular atmosphere, people are pulled into different directions in relation to the presence of nuclear in their lives, livelihoods and landscapes, and their aspirations for future possibilities. Drawing on a year of ethnographic research in the area, this paper suggests revisiting polarisation by exploring the generative notion of ambivalence when it comes to infrastructural futures. When and at what scales might ambivalence be found and drawn on, or even cultivated, in spaces of so-called polarisation? Findings from local collaborative workshops focused on imagining La Hague’s landscapes in 2125, and carried out as part of the research project, will be examined alongside the ethnographic data.
Paper short abstract
The paper traces how Chinese-led extractive infrastructures in Chile’s lithium sector spark socio-environmental tensions and racialised contestations over value, risk, and the future of battery-powered energy transitions.
Paper long abstract
This presentation offers an anthropological reflection on the geopolitical transitions unfolding around lithium, a critical mineral at the centre of contemporary battery infrastructures. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with a battery producer in China, combined with analyses of lithium‑extraction studies in Chile (Bonelli and Dorador 2021; Weinberg 2023; Soto-Hernández 2026), as well as data from the Regional Repository of Chinese Investments in Latin America (ICLAC 2025), the paper examines how infrastructural polarizations emerge through cross‑border extractive projects. I argue that the energy transition generates a “double bind” (Köppel and Scoville-Simonds 2024): lithium is simultaneously framed as indispensable for decarbonised futures and as a source of profound socio‑environmental risk. In Chile, this bind materialises in the tensions between the profitability imperatives guiding extractive infrastructures and the uneven consequences borne by local communities (Soto-Hernández 2026).
Yet the Chilean case also exposes an additional layer of contestation: the racialisation of Chinese capital, especially in its financial and extractive infrastructures. These racialised narratives shape how risks, values, and acceptable futures are negotiated across state agencies, Indigenous territories, and transnational corporate actors. By tracing how these frictions coalesce around Chinese-led lithium projects, the paper shows how infrastructures become arenas where geopolitical imaginaries, developmental promises, and competing regimes of valuation are staged, challenged, and selectively legitimised. In doing so, it highlights the productive lens that infrastructural polarisations offer for understanding the contested futures of global energy transitions.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how the development of anti-crisis infrastructure fuels the dynamics of authority and participatory governance, spanning collaboration, compliance, and resistance. It shows how technomoral politics shape claim-making, limit public engagement, and drive group fragmentation.
Paper long abstract
Large infrastructure projects involving high economic interests and moral stakes, such as public and environmental safety, are critical sites of negotiation between the state and communities, often polarizing people around associated controversies (Anand et al. 2018). Understanding how populations fragment through infrastructure development is crucial for illuminating the dynamics of authority and participatory governance, which range from collaboration to compliance to resistance.
This paper examines how populations living in disaster-prone areas fragment into publics along moral, economic, and epistemic lines during the development of anti-crisis infrastructure. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research on policymaking and civil activism surrounding the construction of a large dam in southern Japan—originally abandoned, but revived after the catastrophic flood of 2020—the study analyzes how technomoral politics shape claim-making processes. Informed by scholarship on technology, morality, and governance (Rose and Miller 1992; Shore 2024), the analysis shows how political actors combine technocratic procedures with moral idioms to determine which publics are eligible to advance claims and how these claims are legally addressed.
While technomoral politics can expand spaces for dissent and democratic engagement (Bornstein and Sharma 2016), this research highlights the pitfalls of morally infused technocratic policymaking. The findings show that the requirement to engage authorities through administrative and legal channels pushes people to seek out institutional niches to voice concerns and protect their interests. This dynamic contributes to group fragmentation and simultaneously constrains participatory governance. Moreover, especially in times of crisis, authorities draw on moral authority to further restrict the scope for “judicial activism.”