*CFP* "DE-CENTRING INFRAESTRUCTURES", EUGEO 2019 CONFERENCE

De-centring Infrastructures

EUGEO 2019, May 15–18, Galway, Ireland

Infrastructure enables and disables the movement of goods, people and ideas. Yet in most contexts, infrastructures evade notice and recognition, buried underground or backgrounded into the mundanity of day-to-day life (Star 1999). This paradox has given rise to a body of scholarship attuned to materialities, labours, practices and relations ignored by dominant technoscientific discourses and modes of production. Infrastructure studies is now a significant area of study, and has generated concepts, methodologies and debates across disciplinary divides (Anand, Gupta, and Appel 2018). In science and technology studies, it has helped unearth the codes and categories that shape and define social relations (Bowker and Star 1999). In anthropology and media studies, infrastructure has become an empirical focus and conceptual tool for exploring the imbrications of the technical and the natural (Larkin 2013; Peters 2015), and the citizen and the state (Anand 2017). Urban geographers have long used the term to explore the spatially distributed and uneven processes of urban metabolism (Gandy 2003), as well as questions of public utility access, maintenance and governance (Graham and Marvin 2001). Recently, imaginaries of Eurocentric, liberal modernity have been challenged through a re-thinking of postcolonial and decolonial infrastructures and urbanisms (Roy 2015; McFarlane, Silver, and Truelove 2016).

For this session, we hope to build on this scholarship by inviting papers that work with and through 'infrastructure' as a concept that de-centres humanist accounts of progress and social change, and the familiar sites and objects of academic research. We ask:

• How does infrastructure brace society, technology and nature in ways that challenge linear, anthropocentric visions of history and development? 
• How do the spatialities and temporalities of infrastructure make evident new political ecologies of water, energy, information, toxicity, and climate change? 
• What does infrastructure allow us to see and say about the limitations of, and challenges for, activist politics and organising? 
• What might it mean to de-centre our research on infrastructures of and for the Global North, the city and the human? 
• How might we pursue new interdisciplinary insights and connections that build upon, but also challenge, the assumptions of infrastructure studies?

We welcome papers of an empirical and theoretical nature that seek to engage with these issues, debates and literatures in an open but provocative manner. Please send your title and 250 word abstract by January 21, 2019 to Jim White (jmerrick@tcd.ie), Patrick Bresnihan (pbresnih@tcd.ie) or Arielle Hesse (ahesse@tcd.ie), of the WISDOM project.