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- Convenors:
-
Umut Kuruuzum
(University of Vienna)
Ebru Kayaalp (Yeditepe University)
Tessa Diphoorn (Utrecht University)
Vidushi Kaushik (Dublin City University)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Networks:
- Network Panel
Short Abstract
This panel explores how infrastructures—from civic systems to security technologies—materialize and distribute risk, (in)security, and polarization. We examine how these material forms both stabilize and fracture social worlds.
Long Abstract
Contemporary forms of governance are increasingly organised through infrastructures that sense, mediate, and materialize risk, security, and insecurity. From roads, railways, leeves, grids to data centers, drones, spyware, and ballistic technologies, these material systems shape how societies imagine and navigate uncertain futures. They render danger knowable and actionable by enabling measurement, modelling, and circulation of data; they allocate protection and exposure; and they crystallize new forms of expertise, responsibility, and citizenship. At the same time, these infrastructures do more than manage uncertainty, they actively participate in producing and intensifying social and political polarizations. Through structuring access, visibility, and vulnerability, both civic and security-oriented infrastructures consolidate boundaries between safety and threat, order and disorder, citizen and stranger.
This panel brings together anthropological and STS-informed perspectives to examine how risk and security become materialized, politicized, and contested through infrastructural arrangements across domains such as urban services, mobility, digital governance, policing, disaster management, humanitarianism, and border control. We invite ethnographically grounded contributions that trace how infrastructures, tools, and weapons both stabilize and destabilize social worlds: how they shield and expose, secure and endanger, connect and divide. In following the breakdown, maintenance, repurposing, or circulation of such material forms, the panel asks how the infrastructures of (in)security make polarization tangible, and how moments of contestation, improvisation, or reappropriation may open possibilities for alternative futures.
Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
• The governance of uncertainty and anticipatory politics of (in)security
• Expertise, modelling, and data in producing risk and polarization
• Affective and moral economies surrounding danger, safety, and threat
• Sensorial regimes and evidence-making in security practices
• Maintenance, repair, collapse, and ambivalence in everyday infrastructures
• Mobility, logistics, and platformization in distributing (in)security
• The circulation of security tools across policing, military, and humanitarian fields
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Ganghwa Island's Civilian Control Zone, this study explores how state security boundaries and infrastructures constrain residents' everyday lives, and examines how the meaning of risk is contested through residents' demands for Civilian Control Line adjustments.
Paper long abstract
This research is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2025 in the northern Ganghwa Island, within South Korea's Civilian Control Zone—commonly called the "border region"—and explores the competing risks of state power and residents' lives centered on security infrastructures. Since the 1953 Armistice Agreement, the state has defined North Korea as an existential risk, deploying surveillance and control infrastructures (fences, checkpoints, cameras, legal regulations) while restricting civilian entry and residence. However, residents experience these infrastructures not as protection but as constraint. State security discourse positions risk externally—beyond the Military Demarcation Line—justifying military infrastructures as risk mitigation mechanisms. In contrast, residents locate risk internally—within the border zone's control mechanisms themselves—and perceive that infrastructures meant to protect them from external threats produce vulnerabilities that threaten their livelihoods. The border region thus constitutes an exceptional space where restricted residence and mobility controls threaten livelihoods. Focusing on residents' demands for Civilian Control Line adjustment and checkpoint removal practices, this research traces how residents challenge state-defined boundaries, negotiate military control in everyday life, and reshape borders. By exploring competing risk logics and their material embodiments, this research illuminates the production of state sovereignty and exceptional spaces under South Korea's division system, and investigates how military infrastructures and residents reinforce and reconfigure boundaries between the logic of protection and the logic of exclusion.
Paper short abstract
Russia's invasion of the neighboring Ukraine skyrocketed energy security to the world's agenda. By then, Europe had a few alternative sources/supply routes in the making for a few decades or in operation for a few years. Expertly negotiated, their geopolitical calculus involved cultural competence.
Paper long abstract
Few subjects have drawn more popular and academic interest over the past thirty years than the subject of energy security. Since the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, 70s oil shocks, and recently, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United States and the European Union (EU) have sought energy security by developing competing strategies and projects to secure new sources of energy. Their energy journey went from coal and oil to nuclear, culminating in fossil gas, the most intricate due to technical, economic, and geopolitical challenges in its supply chain. Europe’s post-war industrialization led to a surge in energy demand. The European gas market saw a boom, dominated by a few companies wielding significant monopsony power. Forty-six fossil gas pipeline and LNG projects were proposed for Europe between 1991 and 2025, sourcing gas from afar, while a third of which were built. Geopolitical infrastructures par excellence (Firat 2025), each pipeline was a tool for gas market design in the hands of EU technocrats and company experts. Designed to mitigate (not eliminate) Europe’s growing demand for fossil gas (energy security) along with the purchasing power and access to affordable energy of the citizens of EU member states (economic security), in this paper, I argue that, regarding which pipeline project should be built and which others should be shelved, the geopolitical calculus played an important factor in their design and negotiation. Significantly, that geopolitical calculus involved more than the alignment of technical superiority, economic feasibility, and state prowess. It involved cultural competence by expert negotiators.
Paper short abstract
This paper follows a municipal waste crisis in a Palestinian town in Israel to show how garbage infrastructures become key sites of rent-seeking, protection and patronage. Waste reveals infrastructural state capture in which private accumulation and colonial violence are tightly entangled.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how the Israeli settler colonial state becomes materially legible in the heaps of waste accumulating on the streets of Arraba, a Palestinian town in the Galilee. It follows the journey of newly elected mayor Ahmad Nassar as he seeks to restore waste collection, wrest control of tenders from criminal organizations and secure state protection, to reveal the colonial state as a material social relation.
Building on debates in the anthropology of the state, infrastructure and waste, the paper treats waste infrastructures as an ethnographic entry point into the relational making of the state. It shows how the indeterminate materiality of household waste enables rent extraction through violent protection rackets and their transformation into political patronage. Following the Arraba crisis, it traces how garbage collection and disposal link local contractors backed by crime families, large waste firms, landfill corporations, bureaucrats and politicians into a single tangle of relations, showing how the racialized margins are fastened to the colonial center.
By following Nassar’s attempts to reorganize waste provision outside entrenched circuits of profit, and showing how this experiment in infrastructural autonomy is violently curtailed, the paper recasts organized violence in Palestinian localities as central to the contemporary Israeli state form, rather than as its negation. The paper proposes the notion of infrastructural state capture to describe a configuration in which private and violent actors control material and social networks in ways that simultaneously enable private accumulation and reproduce Jewish supremacy.
Paper short abstract
Based on interviews with Canadian broadcast meteorologists, this paper examines how atmospheric, bureaucratic, and media temporalities are synchronized through anticipation and improvisation. It shows how embodied expertise mediates uncertainty and shapes public communication of weather risk.
Paper long abstract
In this study, I focus on the temporalities of broadcast meteorological labour in Canada through interviews with meteorologists who produce daily forecasts and severe weather coverage under tight deadlines. I approach forecasting as a form of mediation in a public sphere shaped by uncertainty, risk, and contested authority. Building on anthropological and STS work on temporal infrastructures, and time as technique (Star 1999; Bear 2016) and on the politics of mediated time (Sharma 2014), I treat forecasting as the coordination of heterogeneous temporal regimes, from atmospheric dynamics and model update cycles to newsroom schedules and live broadcast timing.
Drawing on semi-structured interviews with meteorologists from major television and news networks across Canada, I show how forecasts are continually adjusted in response to new data, editorial demands, and unfolding events. I argue that meteorological labour is a site where time is not only tracked but actively managed through practices of synchronization, anticipation, and improvisation (Adams et al. 2009). Whether deciding when to interrupt programming, how to communicate uncertainty, or how far ahead to project risk, forecasters rely on embodied expertise (Collins and Evans 2007) built from training, experience, and attunement to institutional and audience expectations.
By showing how time organizes labour, authority, and affect in everyday forecasting practice, I argue that broadcast meteorology plays a crucial role in holding together temporal worlds that might otherwise pull apart. I highlight temporal coordination as a key site where trust, expertise, and public orientation toward uncertain futures are negotiated under conditions of climatic volatility.
Paper short abstract
On India's Himalayan frontier, roads built for border security and development become sites of landslide risk. This paper examines how earthmovers deployed for road-repairs also mediate risk perceptions. Their presence/absence leads users to experience state attention and thus citizenship unequally.
Paper long abstract
Bordering China, Bhutan and Nepal, the Indian Himalayan regions of Sikkim, Kalimpong and Darjeeling are seeing a frenzy of road-building. For the state, roads herald security of a strategic border. For citizens, they index development and connectivity to the mainland. Yet, built on unstable, steep mountain slopes and river valleys, these roads frequently collapse due to landslides, disrupting life and the supply of goods and services to the frontier – thereby becoming sites of risk to life, livelihood and security. How is this risk perceived and negotiated by citizens and state functionaries? Based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork, this paper draws attention to earthmovers, prominently seen on stand-by along the mountain roads, as tools that repair roads while also mediating the perception of risks. With increasing availability of earthmovers, debris from landslides along roads are often cleared within hours. Normal traffic is restored much quicker than in previous decades. While how roads materialize security and development has been analyzed, objects that maintain and repair roads remain under-examined. Drawing on observations and conversations with citizens, road contractors and state personnel, this paper presents two insights. Firstly, it analyzes how the visibility and deployment of earthmovers influence how citizens and state personnel calibrate risk by experientially estimating how quickly roads can reopen. Secondly, the same highway traverses two Indian states, who unequally deploy earthmovers for road-repairs. The paper examines how both experiences of substantively unequal citizenship and demand for equal state attention congeal around the infrastructural object of the earthmover.
Paper short abstract
The paper explores how formal and informal monitoring infrastructures around the “Żelazny Most” tailing pond shape safety, risk, and knowledge. It shows safety as a dynamic sociotechnical process negotiated between experts, citizens, and technologies.
Paper long abstract
The "Żelazny Most" tailings pond is the largest and best-monitored facility in Europe and one of the largest in the world (Świdziński & Janicki 2016). It is a key element in the stable copper production in Poland. Continuous monitoring of the facility - including numerous sensors, technical systems, the expertise of engineers and scientists - encompasses a range of processes that determine the safe operation of the facility and potential threats to adjacent areas and the environment.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and document analyses (in. risk management strategies), the paper examines the monitoring infrastructures (formal and informal) as a key element of the sociotechnical process of producing safety in the industrial region. The tailing pond is simultaneously an object of engineering and citizens' control, a source of social tensions over safety, responsibility, and exposure to potential disasters. Formal infrastructures meet with informal, as the knowledge about potential danger and ways to mitigate/govern it is produced in different circuits, and represents various social interests. I ask: What tensions, (re)negotiations, and forms of knowledge arise in these processes and how do the infrastructures (re)define the boundaries between safety, risk, and (un)certainty in the study area?
Research combines perspectives from social anthropology and STS, showing how locality shapes technoscientific processes, the role of civic knowledge, and how infrastructures of safety are in continuous changes (they are being negotiated, repaired, modernized, and maintained) and in relation to other infrastructures. Safety is, in this perspective, a state emerging from dynamic sociotechnical processes.