Eventful infrastructures: Contingencies of socio-material change
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Book chapter › Research › peer-review
Infrastructures long tended to remain only in the background of socio-cultural studies and theories, seeming too technical, obdurate, and uneventful for the latter's grand narratives of social change. Yet, amidst a flurry of changes in social theory itself, recent years has seen growing interest across a range of disciplines in the roles and capacities of material agencies generally, and technologies and infrastructures in particular, to exert influence over the trajectories of social life. Reviewing a broad set of literatures informed primarily by science and technology studies (STS), this chapter proposes three analytical avenues along which to take seriously the eventful socio-technical nature of infrastructures. First, in engaging the centrality of infrastructures as the material substrate of modernity writ large, the chapter spells out an analytic sensibility equally attuned to slow-moving accretions and continuities as to critical junctures and shifts within purportedly modern socio-technical settlements. Second, taking a clue from the inherently contingent and open-ended nature of events, the chapter turns to political demonstrations as sites of infrastructural contestations with potentially multifaceted effects across temporally far-flung situations. Third, situating itself within the current conjuncture of multiple ecological crises, the chapter ends by suggesting that this so-called Anthropocene situation gives rise not only to new risk-laden anticipations of future catastrophes but serves also to throw all infrastructure into a perpetual state of socio-technical unrest.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | The Routledge Handbook of Social Change |
Editors | Richard Ballard, Clive Barnett |
Number of pages | 14 |
Place of Publication | London |
Publisher | Taylor & Francis |
Publication date | 2022 |
Pages | 347-360 |
ISBN (Print) | 9781032313818 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781351261555 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2022 |
ID: 347003275