New infrastructure paper

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Introduction: Infrastructural Complications

Penny Harvey, Casper Bruun Jensen & Atsuro Morita

Over the past decade, infrastructures have emerged as compelling sites for qualitative social research. This occurs in a general situation where the race for infrastructural investment has become quite frenzied, as world superpowers compete for the most effective means to circulate energy, goods and money. At the same time, millions of people disenfranchised by trade corridors, securitized production sites, and privatized service provision seek to establish their own possibilities that intersect, disrupt or otherwise engage the high level investments that now routinely re-configure their worlds. The projects of the powerful and the engagements of the poor are thus thoroughly entangled in this contemporary drive to “leverage the future.”

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4 thoughts on “New infrastructure paper”

  1. Pingback: New infrastructure paper | deer hunting

  4. very good, always said that if you want to grasp the leaky, gappy, unintentionally open-ended systems of post-structuralisms just follow any bit of pipe works or track a supply train or two.
    now if only they had an open access e-version to reach out to the people they are writing about.
    “That’s just it; the economics of higher education now prevent the kind of interdisciplinary vision that I’m describing. I think that a literary critic’s work would only be enhanced by a more sophisticated sense of, say, evolutionary paleontology, or molecular biology, or cognitive science, or cosmology. We want to be able to ask answerable questions, but we also want to be able to situate those answers in a broader geography, an engagement of the larger human questions. And that’s how my books work; they work by saying you cannot understand a person minimally, you cannot understand a person simply as a function of his inability to get along with his wife, you cannot even understand a person through his supposedly causal psychological profile. You can’t understand a person completely in any sense, unless that sense takes into consideration all of the contexts that that person inhabits. And a person at the end of the second millennium inhabits more contexts than any specialized discipline can easily name. We are shaped by runaway technology, by the apotheosis of business and markets, by sciences that occasionally seem on the verge of completing themselves or collapsing under its own runaway success. This is the world we live in. If you think of the novel as a supreme connection machine — the most complex artifact of networking that we’ve ever developed — then you have to ask how a novelist would dare leave out 95% of the picture.”
    http://clogic.eserver.org/2-2/williams.html

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