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- Convenors:
-
Nina Amelung
(Universidade de Lisboa)
Huub Dijstelbloem (University of Amsterdam)
Jan-Hendrik Passoth (European University Viadrina)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
- Location:
- HG-09A24
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 17 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Amsterdam
Short Abstract:
In the name of crisis, infrastructures become sites of expansion and political struggles. But not all crises unfold hectic dynamics in infrastructure (re)construction. We invite papers on different sites, politics, reconfigurations and temporalities of “infrastructures, crisis and transformation”.
Long Abstract:
In 2022, permacrisis - a word describing the feeling of living through a period of war, inflation, and political instability - was chosen as Collins Dictionary's word of the year. Although the accuracy and performative power of the term are questionable, a situation of ‘permacrisis’ is recognizable when we analyze the introduction, development, transformation, breakdown, and revival of infrastructures in the military, energy, climate, and migration domains. In the name of crisis, infrastructures become sites of massive expansion, adaptation, and political struggles, and many of them turn into permanent ones, or become entangled with each other. Meanwhile, not all crises unfold hectic dynamics in infrastructure (re)construction. As the ongoing extinction of species, the pollution of environments and waters, or global warming painfully show, crises can also be denied, ignored, kept local, or adjourned for years or even decades.
With ‘Infrastructures, crisis and transformation’, we invite papers that explore the struggles, power plays, and politics of defining, recognizing, and speaking in the name of crisis and transformation, their impact on action in terms of infrastructure, and the challenges they pose to politics. Furthermore, we are interested in methodologies and strategies to study the diverse malaises of infrastructural crises and transformations.
Contributions may be concerned with (1) the diversity of methodologies to study infrastructures in crisis and transformation, (2) different sites of crisis and transformation, ranging from pandemic and health crises, migration and border control, anthropocene, the military domain, the crisis of liberal democracies, (3) technopolitics of crises and transformation (re)constructing infrastructures in the name of crisis and transformation,(4) the temporalities of crisis, infrastructures and transformation, and/or (5) policies and political strategies to develop infrastructures or to turn them into more ‘public infrastructures’.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 17 July, 2024, -Short abstract:
Energy transitions are imagined as a tool that could lead to security and peace and prevent war. We looked at the Israeli and Polish energy transitions through the lens of Reflexive Public Reason (Rudek, Huang,2023) to observe how issues of security, peace and war are constructed.
Long abstract:
Around the world, energy transitions can be seen as tools to address a range of issues, such as tackling climate change, limiting pollution and reducing energy prices, or decentralising energy, which could lead to energy democracy. In some places, energy transitions are also imagined as a tool that could lead to security and peace and prevent war. To observe how energy is imagined as a tool for security, peace and war prevention, we looked at the Israeli and Polish energy transitions. While the energy transitions in Poland and Israel appear to be imagined differently, we argue that the question of securitisation, as well as war and peace, is crucial in both countries.
We use the lens of Reflexive Public Reason (Rudek, Huang,2023) to observe how issues of security, peace and war are constructed. We show how socio-technical imaginaries of energy transitions in two countries shape perceptions of risk and uncertainty and thus co-produce energy transition pathways. Our work is based on three types of data: energy policy documents in two countries and funded energy research projects between 2019-2023, complemented by newspaper discourse analysis for the year 2023.
Short abstract:
The paper uses the US Supreme Court's Wayfair v. South Dakota decision, which allows local jurisdictions to collect sales tax from online retailers and marketplaces, to test theoretical concepts derived from actor-network theory and organizational studies regarding state crisis in the digital age.
Long abstract:
This paper merges actor-network, assemblage theory, and organizational studies to study the consequences of the United States Supreme Court’s (SCOTUS) Wayfair v. South Dakota (2018) decision. The decision upheld a South Dakota law requiring businesses located outside the state to collect South Dakota sales taxes for items sold through the internet. Following Wayfair, scores of states and local jurisdictions have adopted sales tax laws similar to South Dakota's. The resulting regulatory environment has been challenging for businesses, who find it difficult to determine the appropriate tax rate for different transactions and collect and remit the taxes on time. The Supreme Court assumed that its decision would result in jurisdictions standardizing procedures to facilitate sales tax collection. But this has not happened. Many jurisdictions have chosen to abide by their prevailing set of definitions and operations in the post-Wayfair world. The paper proposes to use Wayfair as a case study to investigate ideas concerning governance and state formation in the digital age. More specifically, it proposes to test the hypothesis that jurisdictions adopting strategies of what can be termed “expansive association” in legal and technological terms will report increased power, benefits, and satisfaction with taxation functions relative to jurisdictions adopting strategies of “conservative association”. To test this hypothesis, a study of sales tax collection in the state of Colorado (US) is described.
Short abstract:
In this paper we argue that risk translation practices are a crucial mechanism for resilient health care systems as they enact and value objects and infrastructures of governance. We explore this by analyzing Dutch healthcare governance during the COVID-19 pandemic through a multi-sited ethnography.
Long abstract:
In this paper we focus on risk translation in the governing of Dutch healthcare during the COVID-19 pandemic. We do so to explore crisis resilience in healthcare governance as a concrete practice. We built in this paper on a multi-sited ethnography of the Dutch crisis-organization in healthcare between March 2020 and August 2022. We zoom-in on regional networks of acute care delivery (ROAZ) during the second year of the pandemic in the Netherlands (from August 2021 to August 2022). During this period our participants sought to learn from previous experiences during the first ‘waves’ of the pandemic and started to look forward to a post-pandemic situation.
Our analysis underscores how the COVID-19 pandemic in healthcare is enacted through a multitude of relations of risk. These relations are translated between layers of crisis-governance through relation-building, data-infrastructures, modelling and scenario-building, (re)writing guidelines and protocols next to formal political practices. We argue that risk translation during crises allows for creating time-spaces and infrastructures, enacting crucial objects of governance such as care (acute/’non-COVID’), geographies (‘the region’) and beds (‘an ICU-bed’). Risk translation appears as a crucial practice for resilient health care systems; showing the ad hoc, informal and manual risk work that mediates knowledge and values about how to act during crisis between layers of healthcare governance and emerging collective(s) (in) action. These practices are also inherently political, leading to the in- or exclusion of (alternative) concerns and their representatives in governing healthcare during crisis.
Short abstract:
The pandemic disrupted many health data infrastructures. Drawing on the case of France, we explore three kinds of trials (logistical, representational, enunciative) that had to be overcome daily for data to be fed ‘up’ to the central state administration, and gave rise to various forms of data care.
Long abstract:
The Covid-19 crisis disrupted epidemiological data infrastructures in numerous countries. These upheavals were first due to the uncertainties surrounding the nature of the virus and its modes of dissemination. They were accentuated by the WHO's demand for transparency, the widespread implementation of real-time monitoring, and unprecedented centralization efforts aimed at producing a state-centric vision of the pandemic.
Drawing on the case of French administration, this communication will explore the infrastructural transformations that unfolded behind the scenes of what has been described as a ‘data-driven pandemic’. Taking our inspiration from infrastructure studies and pragmatism, we will show that, in order for data to be fed ‘up’ to the central services, different kinds of trials had to be overcome through various modes of caring. We will detail three of them:
- logistics trials, that required on-the-spot adaptation or complete creation of complex instruments dedicated to the gathering and circulation of various data from different places,
- representational trials, which took the form of a shared concern regarding the ability of data to properly represent the reality of the pandemic, and translated into mundane and continuous forms of data care.
- enunciative trials, that arose when local authorities would communicate numbers that were not aligned with those available on government open data sets, and were notably overcome through initiatives explaining the ‘good organizational reasons’ for such misalignments.
Finally, we will discuss to what extent such care for data and their infrastructure persists once the crisis subsided. What has been learnt from these trials?
Short abstract:
The conceptual contribution discusses the concept of temporary infrastructure in crisis and transformation. Focussing on the effects of temporal boundary work it highlights how temporary infrastructure enables prefiguration, experimentation, exploration, mediation, construction and colonisation.
Long abstract:
The boom in infrastructure studies is accompanied by a critical questioning of the taken-for-grantedness of infrastructural entities. Maintenance, decay, and ruin have replaced the idea of eternal progress and permanent provision. But while critical scholars emphasised these forms of what might be called ontological and practical temporariness, there is still a lack of attention to explicitly planned temporary infrastructure – a type of infrastructure that has come to the fore during recent crises: the protest camps of the so-called Arab Spring, the front lines of the Russian war against Ukraine, or the pop-up bike lanes of the Covid19 pandemic are examples of this broader type of infrastructure that has accompanied human life forms for millennia.
In this paper I will argue that temporary infrastructure is deeply connected to processes of transformation and crisis. In both modes of socio-material change, the conditions of practice are constantly shifting, making long-term planning and anticipation difficult (Jürgen Link). Nevertheless, the normative openness and over-complexity of crisis (Gramsci) can also bring new forms of life to the fore. Recently, we have also witnessed how once permanent infrastructures such as fossil and nuclear power plants become temporary in planned processes of decommissioning.
The crucial feature that makes temporary infrastructure an important aspect of transformation is temporal boundary work that creates limited life spans that regulate the "form investments" of infrastructuring (Théveneut). The paper also presents a theoretical typology with empirical examples of practices of futuring with temporary infrastructure, including prefiguration, experimentation, exploration, mediation, construction and colonisation.
Short abstract:
Based on on-going research on very long-term storage infrastructures (LESLIE) related to five types of risks (nuclear waste, CO2 capture, seed banks, data storage and museum reserves), the presentation will question the role of these long-term infrastructures in a context of permacrisis.
Long abstract:
Western societies are characterized by a globalized economy and an increasingly rapid circulation of goods, services, and information. Paradoxically, we are simultaneously witnessing initiatives that, on the contrary, aim to immobilize certain goods - material and immaterial - for very long periods, while allowing them to be put back into circulation at any time, according to a principle of reversibility. These practices are a response to various risks now identified as major: loss of biodiversity, climate change, massive loss of digital data, loss of heritage artwork, storage of nuclear waste, etc.
This presentation is based on an on-going research on very long-term storage infrastructures (LESLIE) related to five types of risks (nuclear waste, CO2 capture, seed banks, data storage and museum reserves) and how they are endowed with qualities that allow both the conservation of what is sheltered and ensure, at all times, the conditions for their reuse. The analysis of these infrastructures should make it possible to bring to light the way in which societies project themselves into a secular (or even multi-century) future and how they set up institutional mechanisms allowing for their governance and maintenance in the very long term. Ironically, these infrastructures are, in their turn, subject to a changing and uncertain environment. Designed to shelter material and immaterial goods in the very long term, they are in turn subject to what they are supposed to protect against (climatic disasters, terrorist attacks, etc).
Short abstract:
This paper investigates the current infrastructural changes of the Swedish public warning system, focusing on how different actors imagine, shape, and respond to public emergency messages. It explores the challenges and potentials of designing an accountable crisis information infrastructure.
Long abstract:
The promises of an ever more connected world enabled through digital platforms and infrastructures, has created an environment that when a crisis occurs the public have come to rely on and expect swift, accurate and up-to-date information so that they can prepare themselves and get to safety if need be. For crises that are spatially and temporally bound, such as minor floods, forest fires or gas leaks, the public warning system is often quite intact. However, for complex, transnational crises, such as the pandemic, climate change and war, the spatial and temporal aspects are unknown creating a state of instability and insecurity. These crises inevitably lead to a transformation in the information infrastructure where elements of uncertainty, vulnerability and mistrust become more apparent.
The changing power dynamics during a crisis can create value clashes and tensions between top-down strategies by government officials and the public whose everyday practices are to various degrees affected and fractured. In this paper, I study the changing infrastructure of the public warning system and how the infrastructure is enacted through different public emergency messages. I argue that an accountable and participatory governance of crisis information can be challenging to uphold due to social, political, and material boundaries within and alongside the public warning system. Unfamiliar and complex crises create uncertainties in how and when to use the established system and a lack of testing can create frustration and mistrust with the public.