Infrastructure and non-human life: A wider ontology

Barua, Maan

doi:10.1177/0309132521991220

Cited by 98 publications

(62 citation statements)

References 115 publications

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“…In migration and mobility studies, an infrastructural perspective is used in Kleibert’s (2022) research on offshore higher education campuses to shift the prevailing focus from migrants, their families and communities towards studying how migration or mobility brokers (including campuses) operate as and within institutions and networks (see also Xiang and Lindquist, 2014). For Barua (2021) – writing about more-than-human geographies – an infrastructural perspective is an ontology that seeks to decentre anthropocentrism in favour of giving greater attention to the infrastructures populated by a ‘non-human habitus’ (Barua, 2021: 1469) of animals, but which can have a bearing on human life or abandonment.…”

Section: Infrastructuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social geography II: Space and Sociality

2022

Progress in Human Geography

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By drawing together recent geographical literature on assemblages, infrastructures and topology, this progress report examines how debates on the spatial ontologies and epistemologies of power have evolved in social geography. This report argues that the three forementioned approaches each illuminate certain qualities of the relationship between sociality and space, allowing researchers to advocate for a particular way of seeing and knowing the world. The three approaches are distinctive but may not be mutually exclusive. The report concludes by emphasising the need to consider what might be elided through our choice of spatial vocabularies and reflecting on how spatial theorising can promote social justice.

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Section: Infrastructuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social geography II: Space and Sociality

2022

Progress in Human Geography

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“…Even with the emergence of beyond‐human designs, there remain questions of who can flourish under these new configurations of urban co‐habitation, and who cannot. As Barua ( 2021 ) contends, infrastructure not only shapes animals’ mobilities and atmospheres, but also how animals themselves can become urban infrastructure.…”

Section: Urban Planning Design and Infrastructurementioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction to the urban ecologies open collection: A call for contributions on methods, ethics, and design in geographical research with urban animals

Oliver

Ragavan

Turnbull

et al. 2021

Geography and Environment

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This Open Collection proposes innovative research directions for both urban and beyond/more‐than‐/non‐human geographies with animals. We are seeking papers for this Open Collection across three themes: (1) methods; (2) ethics and politics; and (3) planning and design. Specifically, we are interested in papers that pose questions of and reflect upon emergent tensions in researching with urban animals in each of these themes. This Open Collection aims to explore urban space beyond the human lens and to offer new modalities and frameworks for geographical research with urban animals. We are interested in papers that explore urban geographies with animals from a range of different theoretical, methodological, and empirical locations and perspectives. In this introduction to the Open Collection, we briefly summarise existing research in this field, before outlining the three thematic areas of the Collection.

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“…These are stresses that reemerge continually as central problems of modern, racial, colonial, globalized capitalism. Maan Barua (Barua, 2021) and Sandra Jasper (Jasper, 2020) call out the importance of abandoned, disused infrastructures and their relationships to human and nonhuman existences and exigencies. Nelson and Bigger question the casting of nature and ecosystems as infrastructures as an ontological trick of and problem in development conservation and green capitalism (Nelson & Bigger, 2021).…”

Section: Some Ironies Of Infrastructure Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Infrastructural Unrest

Allen¹

2021

Electronic Workshops in Computing

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Infrastructural Unrest' characterizes a growing nexus of knowledge, awareness, participative and activist practices that indicate how people are waking up from the contemporary logistical nightmare of infrastructure and global logistics. It is a wake-up that newly resonates with theories of infrastructure by provoking a systems-level, decentralised field of awareness and action, revealing the interconnections of ecologies of "invisible" systems, ways of life, work and people. The wilful, unwitting and projected invisibility of infrastructures, which modes of technological progressivism (e.g. "ambient computing") attempt to disappear, prove available to rifts and interruptions in the smooth operations of infrastructural globalism. The specific ways in which infrastructures are (made) invisible, to whom and for what purposes, remains an ever more important consideration in the Technosphere, during the Anthropocene, and under conditions of planetarity. The 2020 Canadian pipeline and railway protests, the Wetʼsuwetʼen blockades, a series of blockades across Canada in solidarity with indigenous land defenders, are an example of 'infrastructural unrest'. Actions like this are hopeful examples of a growing, situated awareness of how scaled infrastructures are (made) un-invisible and impactable, as sites where the localized effects and defects of colonial logics of extractive capital can be traced, diagnosed, subverted and halted.

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Infrastructure and non-human life: A wider ontology

Cited by 98 publications

References 115 publications

Social geography II: Space and Sociality

Social geography II: Space and Sociality

Introduction to the urban ecologies open collection: A call for contributions on methods, ethics, and design in geographical research with urban animals

Infrastructural Unrest

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