The Infrastructural Turn in Historical Scholarship

Abstract

This essay argues that historical scholarship has taken an infrastructural turn in recent years. “Infrastructure” serves not just as a popular keyword in monographs and journal articles; it reflects a new approach to research that has permeated the field. An infrastructural approach offers a framework for historians to understand the power of traditional structures like the state and the economy in ways that accommodate transnational interconnections, technology, and the stubborn materiality of the phenomena under study. This essay analyzes why scholars have embraced the term recently, and it outlines the basic components of an infrastructural orientation. It concludes by considering the blind spots of an infrastructural approach, as well as directions for future scholarship.

Infrastructure and American religion: Sites, methods, and theories for a changing field

“…Scholars across the social sciences have leveraged this work to examine infrastructure's relationship to culture and politics (Anand, 2017; Easterling, 2014; Hetherington, 2018; Larkin, 2013). U.S. historians have also caught site of an “infrastructural turn” in their field, including the increasingly prominent use of phrases such as “ecclesiastical infrastructure” (Bridges, 2023). Although that field maintains several possible points of connection with the study of religion, not least through anthropologist Brian Larkin's analysis that infrastructure contributes to “the collective fantasy of society” (2013, p. 329), religion remains overlooked in both the ethnographic and the historical study of infrastructure, and only a small portion of it focuses on the United States.…”