Infrastructuring Environments

Blok, Anders; Nakazora, Moe; Winthereik, Brit Ross

doi:10.1080/09505431.2015.1081500

Cited by 108 publications

(46 citation statements)

References 71 publications

(80 reference statements)

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“…Similarly, the 'hard' or physical infrastructures, from electricity production to agricultural infrastructure do not just provide public goods, such as food, water, shelter, health and energy, but are organically linked to the social project, making it 'lively' infrastructure [3]. Just like the maintenance of certain rural and urban property regimes imply the installation of corresponding physical structures, so does any project of socio-political change demand adaptation of practices of 'infrastructuring' [6], or geo-spatial re-modelling. This includes nature and energy resources beyond the extraction and valorisation of fossil fuels.…”

Section: Agricultural Alternativesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond the resource curse and pipeline conspiracies: Energy as a social relation in the Middle East

Hoffmann

2018

Energy Research & Social Science

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This article identifies problematic tendencies in current analyses of the Middle East's energy relations. There is a tendency to see all social relations as determined by resource extraction, use and transfer, contributing to the uniquely instable social relations of the Middle East. The combination of weak governance and geological over-determination continues to damage the region's fragile ecology. Under these conditions, social structures are incapable to react to new crises, such as the effects of global climate change. This article offers an alternative, more optimistic perspective on the Middle East's energy relations. Privileging the social over the material, calorific, geological or topographic dimensions of energy relations, it argues that social life developed in relation to its natural resources, matter and energy, but is not singularly determined by it. It proposes to historicise and, thereby, repoliticise the Middle East's social energy relations, including its nutritional and geopolitical dimensions. This reveals their spatio-temporally dynamic, rather than materially determined character. Energy is subsequently redefined into a political category, a field of social change rather than a limiting biophysical structure. The concept of Social Energy, thus, transforms nature from a constraining externality into an integral part of social analysis and transformation in the Middle East.

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Section: Agricultural Alternativesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond the resource curse and pipeline conspiracies: Energy as a social relation in the Middle East

Hoffmann

2018

Energy Research & Social Science

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“…But more than this, our knowledge of climate change is in certain senses inseparable from broader processes of globalization. Climate change is a novel ontological problem (Blok et al :1), “an object of massive scientific attention, transnational political contestation, and a focal point for emerging legal–ethical ideals of globalism” that produces the phenomenon of a global environmental problem that manifests within a global ecological regime. The socio‐technical knowledges, collaborations, research programs and inter‐governmental projects that constitute the basis for climate change science is an outcome of processes of globalization (Edwards ).…”

Section: How To Count Carbonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Counting Carbon: Calculative Activism and Slippery Infrastructure

Beuret

2017

Antipode

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The environmental movement in the global North is in a state of impasse. It appears that despite the renewed international focus on climate change, and the actions of innumerable social movements, a “solution” to the problem appears as one, without a viable solution. It is the contention of this paper that climate change has no clearly viable solution as it is a seemingly impossible problem. This paper investigates how the problem of climate change is constructed as a global object of political action and how it functions to render politics into a matter of calculative action, one that seeks—but fails—to take hold of a slippery carbon infrastructure. It concludes by suggesting one possible solution to this dilemma is to turn away from the global scalar logic of climate change and towards a situated focus on questions of infrastructure, or what Dimitris Papadopoulos calls “thick justice”.

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“…Infrastructure has recently gained much prominence in different fields, such as Science and Technology Studies (STS), anthropology, and political science. Following the pioneering studies of Susan Leigh Star and Geoffrey Bowker (Star and Griesemer 1989;Star and Ruhleder 1996;Bowker and Star 1999;Bowker 2000), vital infrastructure-related studies have also appeared in the broader areas of environmental science and humanities (Miller and Edwards 2001;Edwards 2010;Goodman et al 2016;Blok et al 2016;Richardson 2016;Schick and Winthereik 2016;Asdal and Hobaek 2016;Harvey 2017;Bridge et al 2018;Hetherington 2019;Chester et al 2019). These studies concentrate on physical infrastructures, such as energy, transportation, and waste management or information-related ones and cyberinfrastructures.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Information Infrastructures and the Future of Ecological Citizenship in the Anthropocene

Dedeoğlu¹,

Dedeoglu

2020

Social Sciences

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In the last two decades, the concept of ecological citizenship has become a recurrent theme in both popular and academic discussions. Discussions around the prospects of, and limitations to, ecological citizenship have mostly focused on the idea of political agency and the civic responsibility of individuals in relation to their environments, with an emphasis on environmental justice and sustainability. However, the current scholarship has yet to adequately characterize its conceptual bases and empirical applications from an information perspective. Therefore, this paper provides an overview of citizenship studies and infrastructure studies for developing more nuanced understanding(s) of epistemological models for ecological citizenship in our networked world. Drawing on the literature on information infrastructure, this paper then proposes a conceptual framework to understand ecological citizenship as constituted both discursively and techno-materially through neoliberal, anthropocentric informational infrastructures.

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Infrastructuring Environments

Cited by 108 publications

References 71 publications

Beyond the resource curse and pipeline conspiracies: Energy as a social relation in the Middle East

Beyond the resource curse and pipeline conspiracies: Energy as a social relation in the Middle East

Counting Carbon: Calculative Activism and Slippery Infrastructure

Information Infrastructures and the Future of Ecological Citizenship in the Anthropocene

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