Infrastructure(s) & Storytelling: Rethinking Contexts, Connections, & Erasures
Description
Infrastructures, both visible and invisible, are all around us and they permeate our lives in various ways. Larkin defines infrastructures as “built networks that facilitate the flow of goods, people, or ideas and allow for their exchange over space” (327). Though most commonly associated with its physical manifestations, the term infrastructure also encompasses intangible elements that play a crucial role in society. Thus, infrastructures are not merely "limited to pipes, roads, and wires" but should, instead, be understood as “interdependent networks of materials, people, and nature that enable the functioning of modern life” (Lockrem 529). Our seminar seeks to analyze the intricate relationship between storytelling and infrastructures in order to understand how narratives are shaped, expressed, and suppressed. We also wish to highlight how the political underpinnings inherent to infrastructures often reinforce hierarchies of power and inequity. We are interested in examining how the multidimensional nature of infrastructures operates within the realm of storytelling. An instance of the multifaceted meaning of infrastructure can be found in Davies’ analysis of colonial literature, in which he points out that the term refers to both infrastructures in the text, represented by “roads, railways, cantonments” (10), and to infrastructures of the text, which are essentially the “historical raw material…out of which literature, specific crystallisation of cultural patterns and trends, is carved” (10).
We invite papers that engage with diverse perspectives and interpretations of infrastructure(s) vis-à-vis storytelling and narrative formation.
Some possible topics include (but are certainly not limited to):
Imperial Infrastructures
Decolonial Infrastructures
Infrastructures of Violence
Infrastructures of Resistance and Resilience
Gendered Infrastructures
Infrastructures, Access, and Exclusion
Infrastructural Surveillance, Censorship, and Control
Infrastructural Marginalization
Cultural Infrastructures
Spectral Infrastructures
Infrastructures of Urbanization
Digital Infrastructures
Infrastructures and the Environment
For any queries about this seminar, please contact us: [email protected] & [email protected]