Speaker
Description
In recent years, several fields of humanities and social sciences have responded to a so-called ‘infrastructure turn’. The infrastructure turn is particularly prevalent in fields of urban studies and global development studies that have taken infrastructure seriously and interrogated the enormous significance that they have acquired in the current moment. At one level the infrastructure turn has been the motivation for an examination of the politics, practices, and discourses that underly the current infrastructure push. Secondly, but more importantly, the infrastructure turn has formed the basis for grasping the significance of infrastructures within a changed ontology. At the heart of this shift is a relational ontology that incorporates the materiality of infrastructures (technologies, artifacts, and fluids) as participants in the constitution of durable social realities. Thus, for instance, as Steven Graham and Simon Marvin have shown in their influential book Splintering Urbanism, processes of globalization cannot be apprehended without first understanding its basis in particular fragmentary urban infrastructural configurations of linkages and disconnections. Adopting an infrastructural ontology in inquiry reveals facets that are otherwise not attended to – embeddedness, invisibilization and taken for grantedness, and visibilization during breakdowns. History as a discipline, with the exception of maybe urban environmental history has been largely immune to the attractions of this infrastructure turn. In this exploratory paper, I seek to consider how infrastructures have made their presence in transport and mobility histories. I then consider whether facets of the infrastructure turn offer any purchase in the field especially since the mobilities turn.
Biography
Govind Gopakumar is Associate Professor and Chair of the Centre for Engineering in Society at Concordia University. Govind’s work is located at the intersection of interdisciplinary fields of scholarship of science and technology studies, and urban environmental studies. The current focus of his research is on understanding the underlying politics of the growing predominance of private automobiles around the world as a means of moving around in cities and its implications for sustainable and inclusive cities. He recently published Installing Automobility: Emerging Politics of Streets and Mobilities in urban India with MIT Press.
