(National) Critical Infrastructural Studies Conference

When: Thu, Mar 19 2020 12:00am - Fri, Mar 20 2020 12:00am 

Where: UC Berkeley

Depths of Violence, Surfaces of Empire: Opaque Formations of Racial, Settler Colonial, and Militarized Infrastructure

Unnoticed, unremarkable material configurations pervade and enable the quotidian operation of empire. Often disguised as naturalized processes of ecology or as indispensable logistical technologies, the spatial interventions defined by the broad rubric of ‘infrastructure’ serve a dual purpose to smooth and make seamless the violent processes of war-making and occupation, and simultaneously justify these operations as inevitable and unstoppable (Anand, Gupta, and Appel 2018). While scholarship associated with the ‘infrastructural turn’ has incisively dissected the material implications of infrastructural imagination as ‘substrate’ of the state (Carse 2016), few scholars have turned their attention to the interplay between technical, physical reconfiguration of the (built) environment and the social infrastructures which undergirds and rationalizes Western colonial modernity (Nemser, 2017). 

Link: Critical Infrastructural Studies Conference