Location: Northwestern University in Qatar, Doha, Qatar
Dates: 12-13 February 2025
Subject Fields: Infrastructure Studies, Science and Technology Studies, Environmental Studies, Digital Studies, Urban Studies
Submission Deadline: September 30, 2024
About: This workshop is jointly organized by the Liberal Arts and Communication Programs of Northwestern University in Qatar (NU-Q). The human-built world abounds with infrastructures that dominate many aspects of human lives (Hughes 2004). One of the most important insights scholars have shared is that infrastructures are sociotechnical systems; they are constitutive of the social and technical aspects of our world. Steve J. Jackson et al. (2007) coined the phrase "infrastructural imagination" to point to "a way of thinking and acting in the world capable of moving between the separate registers of technical and social action." The way political leaders, government bureaucrats, policy planners, and technical experts imagine and shape the design and implementation of infrastructures, provides glimpses of infrastructural imagination and promises. However, the infrastructural imagination often undergoes complicated processes (Anand et al. 2018), encounters disruptions, ruptures, and fractures on the ground (e.g., Graham 2010), and fails to live up to some of its promises (Davies 2023). The encounters between top-down planning and development and everyday usage of infrastructures can produce unexpected outcomes and disconnected realities. Uncertainties of the environment can also produce unintended consequences. Additionally, infrastructures also require retrofit, maintenance, and repair to stand and hold to their promises (Howe et al. 2015, Henke and Sims 2009). Building on the works of scholars who have examined the opportunities and limits of infrastructures and how certain schemes to improve the human condition failed (Scott 1999), we plan to hold a workshop that will examine how infrastructures imagined for certain functions or put in place in society have unintended effects, break their promises, do the opposite intended effect, or even forbid the smooth functioning of society. We are interested in paper abstracts that address the following questions. They include, but not limited to:
- What are the sociotechnical imaginaries of an infrastructure project being examined and how might the infrastructure produce unanticipated outcomes and unexpected consequences that were not imagined by the planners and designers of the infrastructure?
- When infrastructures fail or disrupt the smooth functioning of societies what improvisations are being carried out to address the failures and disruptions?
- What infrastructural politics is at play when a certain infrastructure is being conceived, designed, and built and who would the infrastructure benefit most in reality? Relatedly, what socio-political role does a particular infrastructure hold in the society in which it is being built?
- How are the promises and imagined benefits of an infrastructure project kept and how do these complicate the initial infrastructural imagination?
- How are state-led and non-state-led infrastructure development projects differ in their imaginations and implementations?
Submission of Abstracts: Paper abstracts should include a title, an abstract (250 words maximum), and a short bio-note including institutional affiliation (max 100 words) for submission by 30th September 2024. Please also include a statement confirming that your proposed paper has not been published or committed elsewhere and that you are willing to revise the version of your paper presented at the workshop for potential inclusion in an edited volume or a journal special issue. Please submit your paper abstract and other requested details using the
Google Form. Authors of selected abstracts will be notified by mid-October 2024. Invited authors will have to submit a working paper (about 4,000-6,000 words) by 2nd January 2025. These drafts will be circulated to fellow invitees and discussants in advance for peer review comments. This workshop will be conducted in person. NUQ will provide invited participants full roundtrip airfare, three nights of accommodation, and food during the workshop in Doha.
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