Lecturers:

Professor AbdouMaliq Simone, University of Goldsmith & Associate professor Morten Nielsen, Aarhus University

Content:

Infrastructural systems are the fundamental facilities constituting cities. These systems are composed of material and immaterial aspects; of roads, people, actions, bridges, buildings, plans, transportation, wires, hopes, pipes, plumbing etc. In this PhD workshop we invite participants to think through infrastructures and explore what the social sciences can gain by turning to infrastructures as an analytical object. By paying attention to infrastructure we will question what these systems can tell us about how material, immaterial and human environments intersect. To study infrastructural systems of cities allows us to identify patterns that focus on more than one dimension. Through this multidimensional approach we want to ask in what way infrastructures can expand our knowledge on classical subjects of the social sciences such as reciprocity, imaginaries, recognition, interaction, (in)security, segregation, creativity, action, temporality etc. Or as phrased by Larkin (2013), we ask: “what an analysis of infrastructures offers to anthropological analysis and what anthropology adds to the study of infrastructures”.

These questions, among others, will be addressed:

In places where legislation, institutions, and basic infrastructures are missing do other systems then evolve? And if so, how? How does planned, yet unbuilt, structures affect the experience of time in urban life? In what way does the materiality of a city change, evolve, expand or shrink over time? How can infrastructure – or the lack hereof – create desires or mobilize actions? How do deteriorating, defective or emerging infrastructures have an impact on people’s experiences of inclusion or exclusion? In which ways does infrastructure in fact structure urban life? By turning our attention to the way in which urban sociality and materiality is entangled, we wish to explore what is made possible or impossible by infrastructures in cities.

We invite participants to consider infrastructure as an analytical framework for exploring social processes. The course reading contains different theoretical approaches. Since the infrastructure of cities is a subject drenched with political, economic and social meaning, we hope this course will attract people from a wide array of disciplines. Papers are required to be based upon qualitative empirical research.