The Promise of Infrastructure

by Nikhil Anand (Editor), Akhil Gupta (Editor), Hannah Appel (Editor)

From U.S.-Mexico border walls to Flint's poisoned pipes, there is a new urgency to the politics of infrastructure. Roads, electricity lines, water pipes, and oil installations promise to distribute the resources necessary for everyday life. Yet an attention to their ongoing processes also reveals how infrastructures are made with fragile and often violent relations among people, materials, and institutions. While infrastructures promise modernity and development, their breakdowns and absences reveal the underbelly of progress, liberal equality, and economic growth. This tension, between aspiration and failure, makes infrastructure a productive location for social theory. Contributing to the everyday lives of infrastructure across four continents, some of the leading anthropologists of infrastructure demonstrate in The Promise of Infrastructure how these more-than-human assemblages made over more-than-human lifetimes offer new opportunities to theorize time, politics, and promise in the contemporary moment.

A School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar

Contributors. Nikhil Anand, Hannah Appel, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Dominic Boyer, Akhil Gupta, Penny Harvey, Brian Larkin, Christina Schwenkel, Antina von Schnitzler

Genres: Politics, History, Cities, Geography, Environment

264 pages, Hardcover

Published August 8, 2018

Reviews

[Kai · Rating 4 out of 5]

Edited volumes are kind of like mixtapes - they're only as good as the time and effort that their makers put in. Our era is saturated by really bad edited volumes due to publisher demand, and these are usually characterized by lack of coherence, wildly vacillating quality, and lack of peer review. But really good edited volumes are riffs on a theme. Like mixtapes, they have a couple old favorites as well as unearth a few gems. And The Promise of Infrastructure tends toward the latter - it's truly an enjoyable read (special note: Duke UP editors do not accept any old edited volume; they really solicit these kinds of texts and consequently have a higher quality than, e.g., your standard Routledge ream).

Anyway, if you do infrastructure studies, this is definitely worth picking up. If you don't, it's probably not totally necessary. Some of the arguments are pretty standard by this point (due in part to the work of the authors therein), and the volume does suffer a bit from academic publishing lag. I believe the conference that this grew out of was in 2014; I knew of a few of these essays from a seminar with Nikhil Anand in I think 2015, so it does feel a bit behind the curve in 2019. That said, there is still some innovative work in here and I'm glad I read it.

[amsel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ein super interessanter Sammelband, der Infrastrukturen als konzeptuelles Tool betrachtet und dadurch auf viele Phänomene neue Blickwinkel ermöglicht. Schon ein nischiges Buch für die Sozialwissenschaften und ähnliche Disziplinen, aber – so finde ich – auf jeden Fall eine sehr lohnenswerte Perspektive zum Einnehmen.

[Vanessa]

I feel weird rating books I've read for school, but this was super interesting and very readable (which absolutely can't be said for everything I've been assigned so far)