Infrastructure can  be understood as an apparatus that supports and enables human life. However, infrastructure can also be differentially allocated, destroyed, eroded, and abandoned. Infrastructure can ensnare and imprison life, just as it can make life possible. Even at their best, infrastructure projects enable the flow of commodities and capital, reinforcing a global system of exploitation that fosters life only while also debilitating and exhausting it. Critical infrastructure studies–work by Brian Larkin, Bruce Robbins, Stephanie Wakefield, Keller Easterling, and Kate Marshall, among others–examines the global poetics of infrastructure, or the social and political effects that derive from the formal organization of material conditions. In this seminar, we interrogate the relationship between infrastructure, ecological crisis, expropriation of the commons, and social inequity, asking what other forms of infrastructure and relations to infrastructure might be possible. We’re especially interested in speculative fictions, practices, and concepts that propose abolitionist, anti-colonial, anti-ableist, post-capitalist, and/or post-growth visions of infrastructure. These can include fiction by the likes of Kim Stanley Robinson, N. K. Jemisin, Ursula K. Le Guin, or  Nalo Hopkinson, but they can also encompass the building out and contestation of data centers, programs to colonize Mars, and the construction of communes or intentional communities prefiguring post-capitalist social forms. 

We’re especially interested in papers that examine: 

• The different ways in which narrative and/or lyric arts model infrastructural alternatives to the status quo and how they mediate between such alternatives and political practice..
• Speculative fiction (SFF), including cli-fi, that conceptualizes ecological crisis in infrastructural terms.
• Traditions of deep ecology, ecopoeisis, and post-70s environmentalism which link infrastructural aesthetics with environmental politics.
• The planetary turn in the humanities and social sciences as a critical and theoretical reframing of infrastructure.
• Social practices, such as financial speculation and urban planning, that plot out and project future infrastructural scenarios.
• How infrastructure limits caring relations beyond the nuclear family and what forms of caring infrastructure exist beyond dominant institutions.
• The biopolitical dimensions of infrastructure, or how infrastructure constructs, fosters, delimits, and destroys species, populations, bodies, and other assemblages of life.
• How reactionary infrastructural projects and formations that speculate new ways and arts of being or living that also destroys life and informs alienation in the name of utopia.