Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Andrew Dwyer, Durham University

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Description:

Conceptual developments loosely found under more-than-humanism have proven pivotal in cultivating critically informed understandings of the various forms of infrastructure whose existence supports and sustains life. The sites where these concerns with technical infrastructure and more-than-human approaches are various, ranging from internet provision (McCormack, Starolieski) and advances in medical technologies (Amoore, 2020) to energy pipelines (Barry, Forman) and border security (Gloftious). Whilst such approaches have extended our understanding of the complexity that underpins infrastructural processes and their ramifications for broader socio-political conditions, other work has inverted its gaze. Here theories of the more-than-human have advanced inquiry into spaces and forms of life that should be considered ‘infrastructural’ whether or not they are couched in such terms (Tsing, 2015, Haraway, 2016). Along both trajectories, thinking with infrastructure and more-than-humanism has impacted a broad set of debates; including the emergence of new geo-political landscapes, moments of breakdown and failure, how phenomena and processes are framed as vital to life (or not), the array of knowledges enwrapped in (or missing from) governmental practices and ontological questions around the forms of sense-making invoked amidst within an inter-connected world. In this panel, we seek papers that set out new pathways in bringing more-than-human approaches together with infrastructural issues to fathom their importance to broader debates that animate contemporary geography

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda