Affective powers and everyday politics of infrastructure

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Although roads, power plants, dams, internet cables and other infrastructures are ubiquitous, until recently they have existed only on the margins of anthropological enquiry. This has changed in the past decade, as the anthropology of infrastructure has become a burgeoning field within our discipline.

In this seminar, we will focus on selected examples of infrastructures around the world and analyze how they are entangled in local politics and the socio-cultural life. We will study how class differences manifest in the traffic on the Bosporus Bridge in Istanbul, how roads in rural Peru expand but also contest state power, and how the Apartheid power relations persist in water-meters in South Africa. Using the example of rogue infrastructure, we will explore the concept of anti-infrastructure. Finally, we will investigate the most current infrastructure projects in Poland and their instrumentalization in politics.

Anthropologists study infrastructure to understand how humans (and non-humans) engage with technology and the material world around them, and ask how our lives change in course of the material transformations of our environment. What can and what cannot infrastructure do? Why is it politically important? What kind of hopes or fears does it engender? Finally, what actually is infrastructure and how does anthropological look at it enrich our understanding of the world?

Though infrastructures are typically thought of as facilitators, some do the opposite. Border infrastructures and CCTV cameras are there to trace and block the undesired subjects: refugees, unregistered migrants, political opposition. Infrastructure can also be used in unplanned ways: During the last COVID-19 pandemic, the role of transport infrastructure in facilitating global travels of viruses and other forms of life has become highly visible. Such unplanned uses of infrastructure show that the omnipotence of engineers and construction planners has its limits.

During this seminar, we will analyze how infrastructures inscribe themselves onto and transform the existing power relations, identity politics, and ethnic, ‘racial’, gender, and economic inequalities. We will use infrastructure projects as prisms to study discourses, regimes and relationships. We will also look at environmental issues: Mobile and immobile transport infrastructures – airports, planes, oceanic ships – are major pollutants. The cloud infrastructures, which require the support of huge server farms with their high energy consumption, are equally ambiguous in environmental terms.

This seminar is recommended for persons interested in science and technology studies, the state and development, but also focusing on the themes of (im)mobility, migration, the Anthropocene, and multispecies or human-animal relations. Everyone wishing to broaden their understanding of infrastructure and to look at it through the anthropological eye is welcome to participate.

During this seminar we will visit at least one key infrastructure facility (location and date will be specified during the semester).

Yazici, Berna. 2012. Towards an Anthropology of Traffic: A Ride Through Class Hierarchies on Istanbul's Roadways. Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 78 (4):515-542.

Schwenkel, Christina. 2018. "The Current Never Stops: Intimacies of Energy Infrastructure in Vietnam." In The Promise of Infrastructure, edited by Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta and Hannah Appel, 102-129. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

von Schnitzler, Antina. 2018. "Infrastructure, Apartheid technopolitics, and temporalities of “Transition”." In The Promise of Infrastructure, edited by Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta and Hannah Appel, 133-154. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Roadsides collection no. 002, “Labor” https://roadsides.net/ejournal/

Muehlmann, Shaylih. 2019. "Clandestine Infrastructures: Illicit Connectivities in the US-Mexico Borderlands." In Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene, edited by Kregg Hetherington, 45-65. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Campbell, Jeremy M. 2012. "Between the Material and the Figural Road: The Incompleteness of Colonial Geographies in Amazonia." Mobilities 7 (4):481–500.

Harvey, Penny. 2010. "Cementing Relations: The Materiality of Roads and Public Spaces in Provincial Peru." Social Analysis 54 (2):28-46. Appel, Hannah. 2012. "Offshore work: Oil, modularity, and the how of capitalism in Equatorial Guinea." American Ethnologist 39 (4):692-709.

Gordillo, Gaston. 2019. "The Metropolis: The Infrastructure of the Anthropocene." In Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene, edited by Kregg Hetherington, 66-94. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Carse, Ashley. 2017. "An Infrastructural Event: Making Sense of Panama’s Drought." Water Alternatives 10 (3):888-909.

Myers, Natasha. 2019. "From Edenic Apocalypse to Gardens against Eden: Plants and People in and after the Anthropocene." In Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene, edited by Kregg Hetherington, 115-148. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Kim, Eleana. 2016. "Toward an Anthropology of Landmines: Rouge Infrastructure and Military Waste in the Korean DMZ". Cultural Anthropology 31 (2):162- 187.

Larkin, Brian. 2013. "The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure." Annual Review of Anthropology 42:327–343.

In the course of this seminar the students will:

 Expand their understanding of anthropological approach to infrastructure in its social, environmental and political dimensions

 Acquire and/or strengthen their ability of critical text analysis

 Develop and/or strengthen their ability to discuss complex social questions

 Practice and improve their discussing and oral presentation skills

 Practice the use of debates from the anthropology of infrastructure for the analysis of the phenomena from the world of their own experience

Regular and active participation in class is mandatory. Attendance of the seminar sessions and preparation of the given readings are part of the workload of the course. Students are expected to read the mandatory literature and formulate one discussion question for each class based on the obligatory literature for that class. Each student (or in groups of two, depending on the number of students) will also be expected to prepare a short intervention (10-15 min) on one of the articles read during the course. Students are also required to submit a final assignment: a short essay (1500 words) on a selected case of an infrastructural project (in Poland or abroad) and an in-depth reflection on it. The deadline for submission of essays is 2 weeks after the last seminar session.

The final course grade is based on:

 regular and active participation (40%)

 intervention (30%)

 essay (30%)

Absenses: Two absences per semester are permitted. In case of doubts or individual program of studies, please contact the lecturer.