Paper short abstract:

This talk discusses a novel methodology for studying infrastructures via on-the-ground materialities. We propose that archives of material, textual objects be introduced into the study of infrastructures in order to collect, order, and analyse social and cultural productions of building projects.

Paper long abstract:

This talk discusses a novel methodology for studying infrastructures via local, on-the-ground material artefacts. Following on the work of Barry (2013), which enlists an analysis of official public industry documents to reveal their performative and institutional politics, we propose that an innovative archive of material and textual objects be introduced into the study of infrastructures in order to collect, order, and analyse the social, cultural and material production of specific building projects. As pertains to humanities scholarship traditionally speaking, archives have typically been state-run institutions holding historical, political, economic and social records from across various arms of governance and societal order. This method proposes to establish and work with a novel archive of the contemporary, a living and breathing collection of documents, stories, reports, notices, banners, photographs, posted bills and rumours - anything textual (in the term's broadest sense) that represents a writing and a reading by contemporary society of the social worlds created and mediated by infrastructure. This consists of both formal/official and local/vernacular material production, so as to show the multiple discourses and representations implicit in infrastructural processes. In this sense, the archive is an epistemic assemblage that can be understood in three ways: a) an amalgamation of projective and managerial devices; b) a testament to calls for accountability and transparency made by local and international investors, municipalities, financial institutions and civil society organisations (Barry 2013); and c) a space for the reflection on infrastructure's quotidian nature: the lived experience of their planning, construction and maintenance.

Paper short abstract:

This paper is devoted to an exploration of "remoteness" as a spatial and social phenomenon associated with modernization and infrastructure change. Drawing on the example of a railroad built in eastern Siberia during the late socialism, it analyses disconnection as discontents with modernization.

Paper long abstract:

This paper drawing on the example of a railroad built in eastern Siberia during the late socialism, is devoted to an exploration of "remoteness" as a spatial and social phenomenon associated with modernization and infrastructure change. The construction of the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM) was accompanied by the creation of new towns and a complete restructuration of the ethnic and social landscape. Being part of the larger Soviet modernization project, the railroad was to "bring civilization to remote corners of the country" - primarily from the perspective of political and economic centers and with an eye toward resources. Whatever the initial expectations and impacts of railroad construction might have been, "remoteness" signifies different things for various groups living along the BAM today. As "overcoming remoteness" (Arce and Long 2000) has been the official aim of the railroad project, an additional question of relevance to us is what happens with those who wanted and/or want to remain "remote" and whether we can access these historical and contemporary "hidden transcripts" (Scott 1990) if they exist. This leads us to our final, slightly provocative, question whether there is or should be a "right to remoteness" vis-a-vis large-scale infrastructure projects. In order to address this question, we will focus on the case of the indigenous community of Ust'-Nyukzha located in vicinity to the BAM, which has received regional attention by refusing to be connected to the railroad and road system.

Paper short abstract:

By focusing on the unfinished infrastructure projects in a Mexican tourist town, and the possibilities this presents to a mixture of translocal communities, this paper looks at the everyday entanglement of personal transformations with social and economic transformations.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the way people's everyday lives are pushed and pulled by infrastructure. I look at a tourist town in Oaxaca, Mexico, where tourism has been synonymous with progress, and where a new super highway promising to link the town to the capital has been half finished and delayed for years. The town is marked by half-finished developmentbe it roads, a faltering electricity grid, or hotelsthat together give the impression of a ruined town that never was. It is also marked by translocal communities: expat retirees, seasonal visitors, or locals with strong family connections to other parts of the country and/or the USA. Amongst these communities there are those that seek greater connection to the outside world, and others that see tourism as killing the very thing that made the place desirable in the first place. Either way everyone attempts to make a life out of these ruins.

Meanwhile, as the major highway work flounders, newer infrastructures such as the internet and budget airlines make it possible for the tourist crowds to bypass not only the road system, but also the local economy. By focusing on the everyday interactions and stories of those that live in or visit the town, I explore the way ideas of personal transformation become entangled with the economic and social transformations of the town itself. I hope to show how these entanglements reveal conflicting ideas of freedom and practices of subjectivity, enabled or disrupted by imposing—yet ever incomplete—infrastructures.