Upcoming Event:
IN THE BURROW:
Critical Approaches to Infrastructure
3/8 9am-6:30pm; 3/9 9am-7pm
Please see website for Conference Schedule
Burrowing describes a laborious process of moving through a dense medium — of confronting a mundane materiality with one’s own bodily experience. The burrow maps the void left by an organism through time within a subterranean, subaltern, or otherwise subliminal environment. Burrowing requires the adoption of an infrastructural disposition towards the world. From a desertified minor literature to the phatic labor of human speech acts to water conduits and digital media, the study of infrastructure has drawn upon, brought together, and adsorbed a wide variety of discourses across the humanities and social sciences. Infrastructure encourages perspectives ‘from below,’ it excavates subsumed and alternative landscapes; it sublimates parallel biological and material worlds, giving breath to their underlying possibilities for life. As pipes, aqueducts, roads, fiber optic cables, maintenance labor, and catacombs — as minor literatures, artifacts, and temporariness — infrastructures offer us conceptual burrows with which to overhaul and undermine scholarly perspectives and methods which are often rooted in the nodes and networks articulated from positions of power and historical privilege.
