Eventful infrastructures: Contingencies of socio-material change
Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Book chapter › Research › peer-review
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Eventful infrastructures : Contingencies of socio-material change. / Blok, Anders.
The Routledge Handbook of Social Change. ed. / Richard Ballard; Clive Barnett. London : Taylor & Francis, 2022. p. 347-360.Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Book chapter › Research › peer-review
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TY - CHAP
T1 - Eventful infrastructures
T2 - Contingencies of socio-material change
AU - Blok, Anders
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - Infrastructures long tended to remain only in the background of socio-cultural studies and theories, seeming too technical, obdurate, and uneventful for the latter's grand narratives of social change. Yet, amidst a flurry of changes in social theory itself, recent years has seen growing interest across a range of disciplines in the roles and capacities of material agencies generally, and technologies and infrastructures in particular, to exert influence over the trajectories of social life. Reviewing a broad set of literatures informed primarily by science and technology studies (STS), this chapter proposes three analytical avenues along which to take seriously the eventful socio-technical nature of infrastructures. First, in engaging the centrality of infrastructures as the material substrate of modernity writ large, the chapter spells out an analytic sensibility equally attuned to slow-moving accretions and continuities as to critical junctures and shifts within purportedly modern socio-technical settlements. Second, taking a clue from the inherently contingent and open-ended nature of events, the chapter turns to political demonstrations as sites of infrastructural contestations with potentially multifaceted effects across temporally far-flung situations. Third, situating itself within the current conjuncture of multiple ecological crises, the chapter ends by suggesting that this so-called Anthropocene situation gives rise not only to new risk-laden anticipations of future catastrophes but serves also to throw all infrastructure into a perpetual state of socio-technical unrest.
AB - Infrastructures long tended to remain only in the background of socio-cultural studies and theories, seeming too technical, obdurate, and uneventful for the latter's grand narratives of social change. Yet, amidst a flurry of changes in social theory itself, recent years has seen growing interest across a range of disciplines in the roles and capacities of material agencies generally, and technologies and infrastructures in particular, to exert influence over the trajectories of social life. Reviewing a broad set of literatures informed primarily by science and technology studies (STS), this chapter proposes three analytical avenues along which to take seriously the eventful socio-technical nature of infrastructures. First, in engaging the centrality of infrastructures as the material substrate of modernity writ large, the chapter spells out an analytic sensibility equally attuned to slow-moving accretions and continuities as to critical junctures and shifts within purportedly modern socio-technical settlements. Second, taking a clue from the inherently contingent and open-ended nature of events, the chapter turns to political demonstrations as sites of infrastructural contestations with potentially multifaceted effects across temporally far-flung situations. Third, situating itself within the current conjuncture of multiple ecological crises, the chapter ends by suggesting that this so-called Anthropocene situation gives rise not only to new risk-laden anticipations of future catastrophes but serves also to throw all infrastructure into a perpetual state of socio-technical unrest.
U2 - 10.4324/9781351261562-33
DO - 10.4324/9781351261562-33
M3 - Book chapter
AN - SCOPUS:85138596082
SN - 9781032313818
SP - 347
EP - 360
BT - The Routledge Handbook of Social Change
A2 - Ballard, Richard
A2 - Barnett, Clive
PB - Taylor & Francis
CY - London
ER -
ID: 347003275