Desire and Denial: on constructing and contesting infrastructures
Events |
Infrastructures can be defined, operationalized and analyzed in various ways. They include the architecture of circulation that underpins modern societies, and they create the environment of everyday life. They are also objects that enable the operation of other objects, organizing materials and spaces in the form of an operating system (Larkin).
Looking at infrastructures and how they work can reveal the politics that underly technological projects such as road or metro systems, as well as how they give rise to “apparatuses of governance” (Foucault). Thus, any study of infrastructure is situated within a cultural analysis that highlights the epistemological and political commitments that are involved in the choice of what is and what is not infrastructural.
Infrastructures also exist apart from their technical and organizing functions, because they emerge from and store forms of desire and fantasy. They are part of the promise of a future in which infrastructure creates a sense of modernity, speaking to the body and the mind and communicating what it means to be modern and progressive.
This workshop is interested in methodological perspectives and looks at case studies when dealing with the planning, failure and protest against infrastructure. It is split into three discursive sessions which focus on historical and contemporary perspectives as well as case studies addressing the following themes: (1) Histories of Infrastructural Governance, (2) Dismantling infrastructures and (3) Infrastructural labour histories.
Workshop organized by TUM IAS Anna Boyksen Fellow Nathalie Bredella in collaboration with her host Dietrich Erben (TUM School of Engineering and Design), and Grayson Bailey (Leibniz University Hannover) supported by Simon Rötsch.
Program
Wednesday, January 29, 2025
2:00 pm Introduction
Session I Histories of infrastructural governance
2:30 pm Lifelines of Our Society. A Global History of Infrastructure
Dirk van Laak (Universität Leipzig)
3:15 pm Victims of Infrastructures
Dietrich Erben (TUM)
4:00 pm Coffee Break
4:30 pm Accounting for Infrastructure, the Body, and Technology through History
Anna Myjak-Pycia (ETH)
5:15 pm Designing flush: the legacies of municipal water in Berlin
Laila Sewang (UC Louvain)
6:00 pm Reality, its denial, and the markings of affect
Kostas Tsiambaos (NTUA)
7:00 pm Dinner
Thursday, January 30, 2025
Session II Dismantling infrastructures
10:00 am Dismantling unsustainable “car state” infrastructures through the cultivation of a “bike state”?
Michael Mögele (München)
10:45 am Urban streets in climate breakdown: Modernity in deadlock
Benedikt Boucsein (TUM)
11:30 am Coffee Break
12:00 am In and outside the factory. A historical long durée perspective on sensing technology and body signals
Daniela Zetti (EPFL Lausanne)
12:45 pm Lunch
Session III Infrastructural labour histories
2:00 pm Reclamation rubble: Italian bonifiche and their legacies as infrastructures of terraforming
Irene Peano (University of Lisbon)
2:45 pm Infrastructural Concealment: A Historical and Environmental Critique of the Cement Industry
Kim Förster (University of Manchester)
3:30 pm Coffee Break
4:00 pm Anthropozemic airport, or, learning to like infrastructure
Mark Crinson (University of London)
4:45 pm ‘To lighten your labour’: Women, work and electricity in interwar Britain
Katie Lloyd Thomas (University of Newcastle)
5:30 pm Closing Remarks