Format/Structure

Paper session

Long Abstract

Infrastructures play crucial roles in the production and sustaining of racial colonial capitalist relations. Yet they are equally necessary for resistance movements seeking to bring decolonial, abolitionist futures into being. Indeed, building new worlds requires building new infrastructures. However, while mobilising resistance may require the invention of new physical and affective infrastructures, it can also require the use of existing infrastructures (whether those be telecommunications, transportation systems, or infrastructures of material provisioning). This leads to a series of questions related to the entanglement of infrastructures of resistance in the same power relations they set out to dismantle. For instance, are infrastructures inherently just /unjust, or is it the context in which they are used that matters? Are there specific qualities which make certain infrastructures colonial and others “alimentary” (LaDuke & Cowen 2020)? Must the infrastructures underpinning the racial colonial capitalist present be abolished, or can they be repurposed? Do infrastructures on the frontlines of resistance movements prefigure the worlds they are fighting for? How can these movements ensure that the infrastructures they rely on do not reproduce (or introduce new forms of) injustice? What sorts of creative infrastructural innovations are being employed in spaces of resistance, and how do they circulate across different geographical contexts?

This panel examines these and other questions related infrastructures of resistance. Additional topics that may be addressed include:

* The materialities of anti-capitalist and anti-colonial resistance;

* Strategies for disrupting colonial racial capitalist and/or extractive infrastructures (including sabotage, blockading, hacking, and creative re-purposing);

* Infrastructures of the blockade;

* The politics of infrastructural dismantling;

* Engagements with digital technologies as mediums of resistance;

* Indigenous infrastructures;

* Anarchist or abolitionist infrastructures;

* Infrastructures of anti-fascism

This Panel has 14 pending paper proposals.
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