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Short abstract:

This paper is concerned with engineering practices in Manizales, a small city in the Central Cordillera of the Colombian Andes. I focus on the ways ecological engineering worlds forms of peace and justice that are not yet available for many people in the wake of a decades-long armed conflict.

Long abstract:

This paper is concerned with engineering practices in Manizales, a small city in the Central Cordillera of the Colombian Andes, where many campesinos who fled violence in the countryside in the 1950s and 1960s settled on mudslide-prone land. Now, their descendants are constantly displaced by mudslides. My research tracks how these campesinos and their kin live (and die) with mudslides, which includes practices and relations with engineering techniques developed by state and activist scientists to create stable ground for dwelling. For example, state-sponsored civil engineers built concrete retaining walls that might fail at holding moving earth during heavy rainfall, while blocking moving people. In search of alternative solutions beyond civil engineering, an activist group of scientists and residents proposed ecological engineering, which includes using bamboo to create small retaining walls and change the shape of land to promote rainwater drainage. This method challenged hierarchies of scientific knowledge and could allow people to build their houses where bamboo walls were installed. Bamboo is also significantly more affordable and accessible than concrete. I show how various engineering practices and infrastructures developed to control moving soils have the capacity to alternately open or close possibilities for people displaced by war to safely inhabit mudslide-prone land, and therefore also engineer forms for doing and thinking politics. I focus on the ways ecological engineering worlds forms of peace and justice that are not yet available for many people in the wake of a decades-long armed conflict.

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Short abstract:

This paper traces the water figurations in the Dutch infrastructure by examining Normaal Amsterdams Peil, especially during the late 19th century. It explores how infrastructural arrangements negotiate water depths where elemental forces continue to operate in the inhabited waterscape.

Long abstract:

Watery figurations play out in the Netherlands, the turbulent delta between the big rivers and rising sea. Normaal Amsterdams Peil (NAP) born in Amsterdam provides an imagined water level for infrastructure throughout the kingdom and a reference for the whole of Europe. Situated in elemental encounters of today, this paper visits the conjuncture where a stable water level was produced by infrastructure, and NAP reproduces itself as an infrastructural figuration for contemporary matters of survival.

As part of a bigger project, this paper explores the elemental forces in and of waters and their implications by especially revisiting NAP in the late 19th century. With memories of flood encoded since the middle ages, the Amsterdams Peil was refigured into NAP in 1891, 19 years after Amsterdam was cut off from daily tides. merchantile capital flow conditioned the compartmentalization of Amsterdam waters. The growing traffic necessitated a North Sea Canal between the IJmuiden locks and Oranje locks, built over the decades, that cut off the city canals from the Zuider Zee. Behind dams and dikes, we still plunge in and resurface from imagined and factual rising and falling water levels.

By treating Dutch waters and flows as elemental actants in the infrastructure, this paper seeks to complicate Dutch waterscapes and pluralize the water ontologies, furthering watery materialities of depth as a nuanced theoretical dimension. In the operations of figurations, we see more than floods or flooded subjects but also strategies and adaptions, in the webbed relations and agencies of present and future.

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In this conference paper, Aaron Gregory PhD draws upon the STS Underground and Critical Indigenous Studies to explore the 'future-primitive' temporalities of lithium power that enable state, technoscientific and Indigenous claims to the critical mineral as a material matter of 'elemental becoming'.

Long abstract:

Lithium is championed by a range of technoscientific and (multi)national actors as a critical mineral anticipated to power the futurities of renewable energy. Although integral to an array of sociotechnical imaginaries, policy frameworks and infrastructural projects developed to mitigate climate change and a range of environmental concerns, the extraction of the element from Indigenous lands throughout the Americas also invokes the lasting legacies of primitive accumulation and extractive capitalism. This conference paper explores the 'future-primitive' temporalities that enable competing claims to lithium power among technoscientific, state and Indigenous interests. Drawing upon contributions from the STS Underground and Critical Indigenous Studies, this paper shares findings from an ongoing research project attending to lithium mining in northern Nevada (USA), locating this primordial element at the nexus of a) universal time beginning with the Big Bang, b) linear time associated with the teleological narratives of progress and modernity, and c) subterranean time capable of unearthing the lasting legacies of colonialism and extractive capitalism. Through these entanglements, I situate lithium power as a means to facilitate implosions of past, present and future, wherein material matters of temporality shape emergent processes and possibilities of 'elemental becoming'.

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Short abstract:

In Japan, petrochemical elements have become infrastructures of care with companion technologies that freeze and heat food. Using feminist approaches and methodologies, I show how the dominant narratives to eliminate plastics need to be situated within the wider debate over gender equality.

Long abstract:

Emerging bodies of scholarship have shown how petrochemical elements enable social and affective relations. In the case of Japan, petrochemical elements have become “relational elements” (Papadopoulos, Puig de la Bellacasa, and Myers 2022) through their transformation into household plastic products. Household plastic products are most prominently seen in kitchens, handled mostly by women. Using multiple methodologies including in-depth photovoice interviews, life history interviews, and the analysis of newspaper articles and cooking magazines from the 1970s, I found that the use of plastics in the household has expanded the variety of care that women can provide to their family members. However, petrochemical elements alone do not act as elemental infrastructures of care. They are mediated by technological infrastructures that freeze and heat food and thereby shift the temporalities of household labour. Together with companion technologies such as fridges, freezers, and microwaves, petrochemical elements became infrastructures of care, not only for women to care for others but also to care for themselves. Drawing on feminist approaches, this paper shows how the dominant narratives to eliminate plastics from everyday lives need to be situated within the wider debate over gender equality.

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Short abstract:

Through the life-taking and life-giving qualities of British Columbia forest fires and the Stop Cop City struggle, this paper adds trees and wood to elemental and infrastructural discourses around contemporary environmental philosophy and politics.

Long abstract:

Though “wood” is – in Greek (hyle) and Latin (materia) – related to “matter” itself it has been left out of recent accounts of elements that draw on these traditions (Pinkus, Peters). Furuhata issues a corrective in asking for attention to non-Western elemental traditions, while others have called for a “xylomedia” history (Ruiz & Kaminska). Counter these more essentialist, irreducible, or even “relational” elements (Starosielski), trees and wood point to the mutability at the heart of matter—“the passive principle ready for the form” (Evelyn 1664). But encountering, accessing, extracting, transporting, transforming, and maintaining this element requires extensive infrastructures responsible for lasting representations of and changes to environments (Cronon, Sivaramakrishnan).

While these infrastructures have facilitated the expansion of capitalism and settler colonialism through their interventions in the lives of plants, they can also have critical, life-giving qualities (Kinder, Barney, Cowen, Berlant). Thinking about elements and infrastructures with trees and wood illuminates many of the contemporary debates surrounding environmentalism and politics through the category of ‘life.’ I will consider these questions by looking at the 2023 forest fires and fire management of British Columbia and at texts produced about and by Atlanta’s Stop Cop City and Forest Defenders movement. In both cases the element(s) of trees and wood – and their ‘life’ – is threatened by a transformation (into ash, carbon, paper, a police training facility) enacted or helped by certain infrastructures (forestry, destructive capitalism, military-police industrial complex) and resisted by other infrastructures (Indigenous prescribed burning practices, anti-capitalist and anti-colonial struggles).

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Short abstract:

By the 1920s dams built on Wolf River in Wisconsin blocked seasonal migration of lake sturgeon, interrupting foundational relations of the Menominee Nation & fish. I use STS, indigenous/settler colonial, and multispecies studies to tell story of Menominee resistance to this infrastructural violence.

Long abstract:

By mid-1920s two dams, the Shawano papermill dam and the Balsam Row hydroelectric dam were built on the Wolf River in Wisconsin. Since then, lake sturgeon, beautiful prehistoric species of fish, was blocked from completing its springtime travel upstream to its spawning location at Keshena Falls within the boundaries of the Menominee Reservation. Blocking lake sturgeon was especially cruel—it highlighted a foundational element of settler colonialism as a structure of elimination, not necessarily or exclusively of beings (natives, humans, or nonhumans), but also of relations of life.

The dams didn't only interrupt. They also enabled whole new worlds centered on white settlers and the new relations they introduce.

This piece is about the afterlife of infrastructure. Since early-1990s, the Menominee moved to pressure Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (WDNR) to reestablish relations with lake sturgeon. That initially took the form of catch-and-release. Slowly the Menominee, the WDNR, the dam operators, BIA, and FERC engaged in discussions that culminated in a quasi-agreement to build a nature-like fish passageway on the Balsam Row Dam to allow lake sturgeon to return to its historic route. To again make possible new (alternative?) worlds and futures.

In 2016 the WDNR gave its decision on the proposed passageway: Denied.

The paper discusses this story bringing together STS scholarship on infrastructure and relational ontology, settler colonial/indigenous studies, with multispecies sensitivities to rethink this episode as a conflict about how to read the past, intervene in the present, and imagine the future.