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- Convenors:
-
Martin Denoun
(University of Liège, Spiral)
Pierre Delvenne (University of Liège)
Céline Parotte (University of Liège)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
This panel wants to further develop the concept of ruination and its politics as something in need of interrogation, explanation or resolution in the context of the industrial global North, where degradation of infrastructures is both a normal and a challenging phenomenon.
Long Abstract:
Research on infrastructure has emphasized the constant activity required to maintain it (Star, 1999) and, more specifically, the need to understand repair and maintenance activities (Denis et al., 2015, Graham & Thrift, 2007). Recently, the concept of ruination has emerged as a way of specifying what wears out, decays, disintegrates as a general trend in the life of infrastructures, particularly in the Southern countries (Stoler, 2013, Anand & al., 2018, Velho & Ureta, 2019). The concept still needs to be unpacked beyond its generally accepted characteristics - for example, it is an ongoing and active process that manifests both a resurgence of the past and a weight on the future or that primarily concerns materials without being reduced to them. Most analyses on global North countries have concentrated on abandoned infrastructures or post-industrial landscapes (Mah, 2012, Pétursdóttir and Olsen, 2014). Beyond the cases of major failures, less attention has been paid to the industrial infrastructures still in use in these countries, whose degradation is both a normal and a challenging phenomenon.
This panel wants to further develop the concept of ruination and its politics as something in need of interrogation, explanation or resolution in the context of the industrial global North. Expected papers may describe the relationship between policy and industry decisions and practices in dealing with aging but operational industrial infrastructures, and may include cases from all industrial sectors.
We invite submissions that address the following non-exhaustive questions:
- What does it mean to talk about the politics of ruination? How does ruination enter into politics?
- What temporal constraints does ruination impose on the actors in charge of infrastructure?
- How can we distinguish between a politics of ruination and a politics of closure or discontinuation? What are the possible heuristic and political benefits of identifying these differences?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Eva Kotaskova (Masaryk University)
Long abstract:
After many years of (political) discussions, the environmental arguments against coal mining in Spitsbergen were supported by an ageing power station that, although operational, was more expensive than desirable. As of 2017, some of the last remaining mining infrastructure is being dismantled, while others are still in operation until a non-coal energy solution is in place. The underlying policy behind this decision is to protect the environment, manage the "wilderness" and transform Svalbard into a nature-based tourist destination. This paper explores how this transformation from coal mining to a nature-based tourism industry is co-produced with and through the process of 'ruining' coal mining sites. Drawing on a relational (more-than-human) ethnography of guided tours, this article explores the process of ruination not only as a result of institutional politics and industrial closure but as a result of more-than-human relationships and engagement with the environment emerging during guided tours. Ruination in Svalbard can be part of a process of reconfiguring the past, present and future in the enactment of wilderness, protecting environment and cultural heritage, as well as shaping “garbage”. Ruination is then a process inseparable from more-than-human relations and engagement with the environment, situationally shaped during guided tours by the guides, tourists and various constituents of the environment; with and through different temporalities and contextual biographies of coal mining objects and their emergent character. o And while ruination can be understood as a (political) attempt to purify the present and future from the past, it is also an essential process in creating continuity and shaping the futures.
Sacha Frenay (ULiège)
Long abstract:
Decommissioning will play an increasingly important role in nuclear governance (WNI, 2022). Understood as “the rationalized process of deconstructing an organized whole” (Blanck, 2021, p.3), it encompasses all tasks required after the closure of a nuclear facility, including waste and spent fuel management activities. Such complex processes entail many sociotechnical uncertainties and engage our societies in the long term.
I examine the interwoven and conflicting temporal logics that govern nuclear decommissioning processes and practices. Through the illustrative case of the Belgian Reactor 3 (BR3) – first pressurized water reactor built in Europe and pioneer for decommissioning activities –, I reveal that multiple ‘temporal inconsistencies’ (Felt, 2016) challenge or hinder the implementation of decommissioning practices. Despite being shut down in 1987, operations at the BR3 are not expected to be completed before 2027. Moreover, the materialization of past (in)actions highlights that the BR3 project is also shaped by its - sometimes burdensome – heritage, and calls to consider what traces current operations and decisions will leave.
Faced with networked challenges, both policymakers and nuclear operators are tempted to (try to) suspend time to avoid them. Taking advantage of an ambiguous nuclear policy in Belgium, standby allows them both to soothe temporal inconsistencies and retain freedom of action. However, as decay is an inevitable process (Velho & Ureta, 2019), it in turn leads to the need for maintenance into closure. This contribution will look at the lessons (not yet) learned from the BR3, and what this can teach us about future projects.
Dagmar Vorlicek (University of Vienna)
Long abstract:
This paper explores what happens to socio-material infrastructures built to address specific security challenges when the threats they were supposed to tackle fade away, when the dominant security discourses change, and when the technologies they use are no longer fit for their intended purposes. These ‘security leftovers’ stay in the world and continue to have lives of their own. They may take many forms: from infrastructures of colonial domination in the Global South through never-used military arsenals and abandoned Cold War bunkers and barracks to logistical bases and protection technologies developed during the Western counterterrorism and counterinsurgency endeavours following 9/11. However, beyond armaments and built environment, there are also many less tangible security leftovers, such as institutions and corresponding bodies of expertise that were used to uphold security regimes of the past and that keep their diverse lives in the new conditions.
Serving as an introduction to a larger project working with diverse case studies, the paper focuses on studying the trajectories of technologies, infrastructures, objects, and sites, which were designed to serve specific security purposes, yet their social life continued even in the new conditions as security regimes shifted. Seeking to go beyond (but not leaving aside) the focus on security artefacts as objects of remembering, this paper is interested in repurposing, adapting, and reusing particular security materialities, and their enduring social role.
Martin Denoun (University of Liège, Spiral) Céline Parotte (University of Liège) Pierre Delvenne (University of Liège)
Long abstract:
This paper aims to unfold the nuclear “material politics” (Barry, 2013) through the stress corrosion case occurring in the French nuclear fleet over the past two years. In August 2021, a microcrack measuring just a few millimeters was discovered on a pipe in the backup circuit of a nuclear reactor in France. This type of crack was not expected and therefore not monitored by the national operator EDF. Shortly after this discovery, other microcracks of this type were found on each of these backup circuits on 18 nuclear reactors (the most recent ones), causing shutdowns that cost EDF tens of billions of euros, threatening the French electricity system with blackouts and put pressure on the whole fleet and the reactors under construction. This micro-phenomenon has thus produced gigantic effects.
The paper aims to show how a large sociotechnical system can be profoundly weakened by phenomena such as microcracks. These microcracks have made visible a series of elements: the fragile mediations that enable safety operators to know how materials are evolving; the non-causal relationship between ageing and degradation; the short memory that operators have of the infrastructure they manage.
Based on semi-directive interviews, in-depth documents analysis and archives, this paper relies on a triple hypothesis: first, that this stress corrosion case provides a very specific insight into nuclear material politics; second that material politics is a neglected aspect of nuclear politics; third that this case shows that if nuclear wastes entered into politics (Barthe, 2006), nuclear materials failed to do so.
Luca Hopman (Utrecht University) Marguerite van den Berg (Utrecht University)
Long abstract:
This paper considers Western European welfare states and its collective provisions as infrastructures of care – infrastructures that were built in industrial economies and have changed as a result of austerity and revisions for decades now. Building on Ann Laura Stoler’s framework for understanding imperial ruination, this paper considers welfare states as the object of various rounds of ruination, leaving contemporary dwellers in Western Europe with welfare debris: structures and pieces that are not the original structure but may be used in everyday life. Studying ruination and debris in the context of welfare opens the possibility to look at how Europeans build a life with the welfare debris that they are left with. This paper considers this question by learning from an ethnographic case in the context of public housing in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. We perceive public housing apartments as objects of ruination through a lack of renovation and insulation. Going along with an NGO that conducts insulation repair activities within public houses, we provide an account of the material and immaterial practices of repair and care by dwellers and the NGO workers in order to navigate the politics of ruination at home, which is simultaneously an integral aspect to holding the ruins together. We contribute to our understanding of what a politics of ruination can look like within the context of the history and remains of public housing in Amsterdam, and what the repair and care practices of people within welfare debris mean for making and doing transformations.