Infrastructure Futures: interdisciplinary experiences and insights

As researchers studying infrastructures, speculative infra-futures and infra-futures-in-becoming, our definitions of infrastructure vary. For some of us, infrastructures are the material and immaterial fabric that enables our lives and lifestyles while their futures are diverse and uncertain. For others, infrastructure underpins speculative futures that produce uneven distributional effects. Yet for all of us, infrastructures are undergoing constant change of various speeds and magnitude with social and political consequences. We grapple with questions like: how do we research the becoming, the speculative, the flux, the future-orientated fantasies that generate new while remaining entangled with the past? 

We know many in the social sciences are working through similar questions and we would like to create a space to share insights on how we are collectively generating new lines of inquiry in the field of infrastructure studies and around which conceptual frameworks we are coalescing. For this reason, we are organising the workshop ‘Infrastructure Futures: interdisciplinary experiences and insights’.  We envision it to be an opportunity for participants to share through roundtable discussions their experiences with, critical inputs to, and limitations of the theoretical frameworks they are employing in their empirical study of built environment infrastructure and their futures.

Organisers: Costanza Concetti, Leonard Schliesser, Ritwika Basu, Helen James, and Anna Okada