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).

This Panel has 2 pending paper proposals.
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