Paper 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.

Paper 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.

Paper short abstract:

By outlining the practices and processes of tree planting in northwestern Canada, this paper adds trees and wood to elemental and infrastructural discourses around contemporary environmental philosophy and politics.

Paper 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). But encountering, accessing, extracting, transporting, transforming, and maintaining this element requires extensive infrastructures responsible for lasting representations of and changes to environments.

While these infrastructures facilitate 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 contemporary debates surrounding environmentalism and politics through the category of ‘life.’ I will consider these questions through the processes and practices of tree planting in northwestern Canada. Tracing how these various infrastructures – nurseries, boxes, ex-military helicopters, caches, trucks, bags, shovels, hands, etc. – function to make and grow ‘life’ reveals how they also define and distribute ‘life.’ With elements like carbon – the building block of life on earth – and infrastructures like logging roads, we can think through our relation to trees and wood, their place as a renewable and sustainable resource, and how we might organize environmental political action.

Paper 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.

Paper 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.

Paper short abstract:

This project traces the hydro-figurations in the Dutch infrastructure by examining Normaal Amsterdams Peil, its historical origin and contemporary iterations. Infrastructural arrangements that negotiate water depths exist in tension with elemental forces operating in the inhabited waterscape.

Paper long abstract:

Hydro-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 Dutch infrastructure and a reference for the whole of Europe. Situated in elemental encounters of today, this paper visits the conjunctures where the dimension of water depth is relevant to contemporary matters of survival.

I explore the elemental forces in water versus land, solid versus fluid, and height versus depth. This is unravelled by revisiting NAP's historical development in the 17th and 19th centuries, encoding the memories of tidal floods and state formation. In the process, the elemental force of mercantile capital flow also conditioned the compartmentalisation and control of Amsterdam waters. However, behind dams and dikes, we still plunge in and resurface from imagined and factual rising and falling water levels. I argue for a metonymical turn in figuring water.

By treating Dutch waters and flows as elemental actants in the infrastructure, this project seeks to complicate Dutch waterscapes and pluralise the water ontologies, furthering watery materialities of depth as a nuanced theoretical dimension and a metonymy for the living space. In the operations of hydro-figuration of depth, we see more than floods or flooded subjects; we also see strategies and adaptions in the webbed relations and agencies of the present and future.