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- Convenors:
-
Mette Simonsen Abildgaard
(Aalborg University)
Kista Bianco Kjær (Aalborg University)
Kira Elise Apted Tilcock (Aalborg Univeristy Copenhagen)
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- Format:
- Combined Format Open Panel
Short Abstract
Life with infrastructural systems is marked by endurance, postponement, and waiting. This panel aims to explore how temporal logics of waiting shape practices at the edges of infrastructures, and how they are embedded within broader political, colonial practices at the center of governance.
Description
Challenging notions of technical immediacy and efficiency, life with digital and analogue infrastructures is often marked by waiting. We wait for assistance, for updates, for the right time. Importantly, waiting is not a merely a sign of operational or technical failure, but an integral part of maintaining resilient infrastructures. Recent work has highlighted the invisibility and mundanity of maintenance (Denis & Pontille 2025; Jackson et al. 2024), but the role of passivity in caring for infrastructure remains underexplored. Reflecting the conference theme, we thus ask how infrastructural maintenance work and its temporalities can serve to handle breakdowns, function as a governance strategy, or represent involuntary holding patterns while we wait - or hope for – future developments. Might waiting contribute to resiliency in future-making?
We invite contributions that explore how practices of postponement, enduring and waiting shape the edges (Watts 2018) of infrastructural systems, but also how such practices are embedded within broader political, colonial, and temporal logics at the center of governance. How might ‘waiting around’ become sites for new forms of attention, sovereignty, and resilience? Contributions can include:
- Waiting at the edge: How are practices of postponement part of the edges of infrastructures? How do edges function as zones of active waiting rather than passive delay?
- Colonial and political logics: In what ways are practices of waiting intertwined with colonial histories, governance, and power structures that shape infrastructural temporality?
- Waiting infrastructures: How might infrastructures ‘themselves’ wait? What does it mean for systems to be in a state of readiness, delay or pause?
- Historical / case studies: What are illustrative examples from historical or contemporary contexts that highlight different regimes of infrastructural waiting and delay?
- Methodological considerations: What are the methodological challenges of attending to practices of ‘wasting time’ or ‘doing nothing’ in infrastructural systems?