Coming to terms with affective infrastructure

Wilson, Helen F.

doi:10.1177/20438206231154347

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 11 publications

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“…The above responses can clarify the questions Helen Wilson (2023) perceptively poses concerning ‘what is at stake when a concept appears’, alongside a compelling reflection on the controversy surrounding the Tyne Bridge. Conceptual labor is itself mediated; pressures exist within the social relations of conferences and journals to coin The New Concept which will act as if it fixes a problem.…”

Section: Affective Infrastructures: Singularity Responsibility Mediat...mentioning

confidence: 93%

What do we want from a concept?

Bosworth

2023

Dialogues in Human Geography

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The article ‘What is “affective infrastructure”?’ sought to historicize and rework a concept in geographical and philosophical thought. In doing so, it aimed to understand how scholars use the notion of ‘affective infrastructure’ to clarify the specific (but also rather diverse) relationships among spaces or worlds or ideas to which it was applied. The article also offered my own wagers: that in grasping at infrastructure today, scholars are sometimes implicitly missing – or explicitly disavowing – some of the historical-materialist and partisan origins and potential uses of the concept in continental theory, but also revolutionary movement analysis. Five reviews by six readers disaggregate my attempts to clarify and synthesize the stakes of this concept. This commentary responds to each of these generous accounts and reflects on the mediating work and stakes of conceptual genealogies, inventions, and rehabilitations.

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Section: Affective Infrastructures: Singularity Responsibility Mediat...mentioning

confidence: 93%

What do we want from a concept?

Bosworth

2023

Dialogues in Human Geography

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Urban maintenance as compromise: Coming to terms with the multispecies city

Wilson

2024

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

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The paper examines the role of maintenance and repair in the multispecies city as central to understanding the relationship between non-human life and infrastructure. The focus of the paper is the black-legged kittiwake, a pelagic species of gull. Kittiwakes have long-used artificial structures for nesting, but the rapid growth of seabird colonies in UK towns and cities has seen their inhabitation of urban infrastructure pose new challenges. Drawing on ethnographic research from the eastern coast of England, the paper develops the notion of ‘maintenance as compromise’ to capture how forms of infrastructural maintenance reflect an adjustment or coming to terms with new ecological proximities. Through three cases, namely, non-human inhabitation of an iconic infrastructure, routine infrastructural work in the form of street cleaning, and transformational repairs that support the use of buildings by breeding birds, the paper argues that undertaking maintenance as a form of compromise not only allows for messy co-presence, but demonstrates an understanding of infrastructure that takes the lifeworlds of non-humans seriously. However, while such a coming to terms indicates a shift in the politics of knowledge, attending to the collective life of infrastructure reveals the simultaneous constraints and tensions that make radical propositions for alternative futures difficult to imagine. The paper thus concludes by underlining the complex motivations that shape practices of repair and maintenance in the multispecies city, the problem with taking such works as a sign of shifting ethical relations, and the expertise and unknowns that are involved in responding to non-human inhabitations of infrastructure.

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Coming to terms with affective infrastructure

Cited by 2 publications

References 11 publications

What do we want from a concept?

What do we want from a concept?

Urban maintenance as compromise: Coming to terms with the multispecies city

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