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The promise of infrastructure

Contributor(s): Material type: TextTextPublication details: Duke University Press 2018 DurhamDescription: vi, 256 p. Includes bibliographical references and indexISBN:
  • 9781478000181
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 363.6 P7
Summary: From U.S.-Mexico border walls to Flint's poisoned pipes, there is a new urgency to the politics of infrastructure. Roads, electricity lines, water pipes, and oil installations promise to distribute the resources necessary for everyday life. Yet an attention to their ongoing processes also reveals how infrastructures are made with fragile and often violent relations among people, materials, and institutions. While infrastructures promise modernity and development, their breakdowns and absences reveal the underbelly of progress, liberal equality, and economic growth. This tension, between aspiration and failure, makes infrastructure a productive location for social theory. Contributing to the everyday lives of infrastructure across four continents, some of the leading anthropologists of infrastructure demonstrate in The Promise of Infrastructure how these more-than-human assemblages made over more-than-human lifetimes offer new opportunities to theorize time, politics, and promise in the contemporary moment. A School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar Contributors. Nikhil Anand, Hannah Appel, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Dominic Boyer, Akhil Gupta, Penny Harvey, Brian Larkin, Christina Schwenkel, Antina von Schnitzler https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-promise-of-infrastructure
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Item type Current library Item location Collection Shelving location Call number Status Date due Barcode
Books Vikram Sarabhai Library Rack 26-A / Slot 1177 (0 Floor, East Wing) Non-fiction General Stacks 363.6 P7 (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Available 199980

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Temporality, Politics, and the Promise of Infrastructure / Hannah Appel, Nikhil Anand, and Akhil Gupta 1

Part I. Time

1. Infrastructural Time / Hannah Appel 41

2. The Future in Ruins: Thoughts on the Temporality of Infrastructure / Akhil Gupta 62

3. Infrastructures in and out of Time: The Promise of Roads in Contemporary Peru / Penny Harvey 80

4. The Current Never Stops: Intimacies of Energy Infrastructure in Vietnam / Christina Schwenkel 102
Part II. Politics

5. Infrastructure, Apartheid Technopolitics, and Temporalities of "Transition" / Antina von Schnitzler 133

6. A Public Matter: Water, Hydraulics, Biopolitics / Nikhil Anand 155
Part III.

7. Promising Forms: The Political Aesthetics of Infrastructure / Brian Larkin 175

8. Sustainable Knowledge Infrastructures / Geoffrey C. Bowker 203

9. Infrastructure, Potential Energy, Revolution / Dominic Boyer 223

Contributors 245

Index 249

From U.S.-Mexico border walls to Flint's poisoned pipes, there is a new urgency to the politics of infrastructure. Roads, electricity lines, water pipes, and oil installations promise to distribute the resources necessary for everyday life. Yet an attention to their ongoing processes also reveals how infrastructures are made with fragile and often violent relations among people, materials, and institutions. While infrastructures promise modernity and development, their breakdowns and absences reveal the underbelly of progress, liberal equality, and economic growth. This tension, between aspiration and failure, makes infrastructure a productive location for social theory. Contributing to the everyday lives of infrastructure across four continents, some of the leading anthropologists of infrastructure demonstrate in The Promise of Infrastructure how these more-than-human assemblages made over more-than-human lifetimes offer new opportunities to theorize time, politics, and promise in the contemporary moment.

A School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar

Contributors. Nikhil Anand, Hannah Appel, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Dominic Boyer, Akhil Gupta, Penny Harvey, Brian Larkin, Christina Schwenkel, Antina von Schnitzler

https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-promise-of-infrastructure

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