Events

This workshop has the following objectives: (a) it seeks to advance a dialogue between STS scholars and critical social scientists on the meanings and forms of infrastructure. In addition, (b), it seeks to bring historical and contemporary studies of infrastructural projects into dialogue with theoretical discussions that foreground the intersection of the social and the material; (c) it seeks to contribute to the still-nascent discussion of the intersections of social and material infrastructures in Asia.

Historians, especially historians of technology, have long been concerned with the material origins of modern and urban life, an interest that has led to intensive studies of particular infrastructures – e.g., water, roads, electricity grids, transport systems – especially in the West (e.g., the classic study by Hughes, 1983). STS-oriented scholars among their ranks have sought to explore the multiple intersections of the social and the material in infrastructures, with a particular emphasis on breaking down the assumed inanimate and non-human ontologies of the material and natural respectively (e.g., Latour 1993). While this approach has been both productive and theoretically innovative, questions of hierarchy, cultural division, social marginality and political exclusion have not always been central to this scholarship (with the notable exception of Donna Haraway, 1991, among others).

In recent years, anthropologists and human geographers have transported the idea of infrastructure well beyond its familiar meaning — the material underpinnings of economic life and the modern habitus — by extending its conceptual reach to the social and cultural (Star 1999). This move has led to a number of important conceptual innovations, notably the articulation of social interactions and networks as forms of contingent and disembodied infrastructure (Elyachar 2010; Robbins 2007; Simone 2004). Infrastructure as a social space and condition has been read variously as strategic modes of coping and resilience, the production of new publics, and the ubiquity of informal structures that dwarf the legible world. Notwithstanding the value of extending the concept of infrastructure beyond its material origins, for the most part this body of work has not subjected the presumption of the material as ontologically different to the same scrutiny, a starting point for STS scholarship.

Given these overlapping but relatively autonomous developments, it seems opportune to convene a small and focused workshop to explore these intersections in more detail. We propose to invite a multi-disciplinary group of scholars – primarily anthropologists, historians, and STS scholars – to discuss the multiple combinations of the material and the social, and, the natural and the man-made, read through the thematic of infrastructure(s).

Among the questions we are keen to explore further in this workshop are:

1. What an STS approach can contribute to the growing scholarship on infrastructures being produced particularly by anthropologists and geographers.
2. How questions that recur in the new infrastructure scholarship – particularly the urban, the marginal, and the excluded – can influence work being done in STS.
3. How the study of Asian social and material infrastructures complements and complicates corresponding studies of these systems in other geopolitical settings.