This seminar explores the persistent relationship between fascism and infrastructure. It draws on discourse in critical infrastructure studies as well as scholarship on the history of fascist and neofascist movements to address the resurgence of authoritarian regimes around the world.

Although fascist regimes have long been known for grand infrastructure projects, they have been just as persistent in destroying infrastructure: degrading utilities, cutting off access, and walling off entire territories. This can be seen in the creation of ghettos or internment areas stripped of basic services (Weizman 2026) or in what Beveridge/Naumann/Rudolph (2024) call infrastructural populism––mobilizing against infrastructure, such as green energy projects, framed as an imposition by out-of-touch elites.  

We welcome papers that explore the relationship between infrastructure and far-right and authoritarian politics in different ways:  What is the ideological work that infrastructure has historically performed under fascist regimes? Are there infrastructures that foster an attachment to reactionary politics (Gorz 1973)? How has infrastructure been used as an often implicit and hidden source of control over both economies and populations (Easterling 2014)? And how have remnants of fascist infrastructure continued to exercise an influence over society today (Carillo 2022)?

Finally: What role have aesthetic practices played in either bolstering—or contesting—fascist infrastructure?  

Topics may include (but are not limited to):

• Media infrastructure, digital infrastructure
• Monumentality, city planning, and architecture: neoclassicism, monuments, ruins
• Centers and peripheries: how peripheralization leads to grievance (Mullis 2025)
• Mobility and transit: highways, railways, airports
• Architecture and empire: race, gender, and class
• Ecology and environmental harm
• Policing, surveillance, and security
• Access to infrastructure, sanitation: weaponized neglect, the creation of ghettos, the denial of access (Weizman 2026)
• Counter-infrastructure: mutual aid and community networks; maintenance and care as practices of resistance; aesthetic techniques for contesting power (such as distancing and/or de-centering)

Seminar participants will present position papers (15-20 minutes in length). We encourage submissions by scholars working in various humanities disciplines.