Handbook of Infrastructures and Cities

Handbook of Infrastructures and Cities
Author: Olivier Coutard
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 483
Release: 2024-04-12
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1800889151

Contributing towards a thriving research area, this comprehensive Handbook presents a broad discussion of infrastructure as social phenomena. It compiles diverse perspectives to delineate the current ‘infrastructural turn’ and assess policy and research challenges relating to contemporary forms of infrastructural development.

Houses Transformed

Houses Transformed
Author: Jonathan Alderman
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2024-01-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1805392328

Over the decades, there has been a world-wide transformation of so-called ‘vernacular houses’. Based on ethnographic accounts from different regions, Houses Transformed investigates the changing practices of building houses in a transnational context. It explores the intersection of house biographies and social change, the politics of housing design, the social fabrication of aspirational houses, the domestication of concrete and the intersection of materiality and ontology as well as the rhetoric of the vernacular. The volume provides new anthropological pathways to understanding the dynamics of dwelling in the 21st century.

Watchful Lives in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

Watchful Lives in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
Author: Catherine Whittaker
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2023-04-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 3110986264

Watchfulness shapes many Chicanxs’ and other People of Color’s everyday lives in San Diego. Experiencing racist discrimination can lead to becoming vigilant, which frames their subjectivity. Focusing particularly on Chicanxs, we show how they seek to intervene against structural inequalities and threats in their lives, such as by re-claiming space, consciousness raising, participating in protests, and healing practices. We argue that contestations surrounding belonging create particularly watchful selves and that this is a significant aspect of borderland lifeworlds more broadly. The book advances the Anthropology of borders, coloniality, subjectivity, and race, as well as contributing to Chicano and Latino Studies, and Urban Studies. Pushing the boundaries of conventional approaches, this book is methodologically innovative by including team fieldwork, digital ethnography, and illustrative work by a local artist. It fills a gap in Security Studies by examining peer-to-peer vigilance beyond top-down surveillance and bottom-up "sousveillance," and expanding previous understandings of watchfulness as an ambivalent practice that can also express care and contribute to community building, as well as representing a "way of life."

The Promise of Infrastructure

The Promise of Infrastructure
Author: Nikhil Anand
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2018-07-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1478002034

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

Media Infrastructures and the Politics of Digital Time

Media Infrastructures and the Politics of Digital Time
Author: Stine VOLMAR
Publisher: Recursions
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2021-09-06
Genre:
ISBN: 9789463727426

Digital media everyday inscribe new patterns of time, promising instant communication, synchronous collaboration, intricate time management, and profound new advantages in speed. The essays in this volume reconsider these outward interfaces of convenience by calling attention to their supporting infrastructures, the networks of digital time that exert pressures of conformity and standardization on the temporalities of lived experience and have important ramifications for social relations, stratifications of power, practices of cooperation, and ways of life. Interdisciplinary in method and international in scope, the volume draws together insights from media and communication studies, cultural studies, and science and technology studies while staging an important encounter between two distinct approaches to the temporal patterning of media infrastructures, a North American strain emphasizing the social and cultural experiences of lived time and a European tradition, prominent especially in Germany, focusing on technological time and time-critical processes.

Liminality, Transgression and Space Across the World

Liminality, Transgression and Space Across the World
Author: Basak Tanulku
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2024-03-05
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1040001289

This book analyses various forms of liminality and transgression in different geographies and demonstrates how and why various physical and symbolic boundaries create liminality and transgression. Its focus is on comprehending the ways in which these borders and boundaries generate liminality and transgression rather than viewing them solely as issues. It provides case studies from the past and present, allowing readers to connect subjects, periods, and geographies. It consists of theoretical and empirical chapters that demonstrate how borders and liminality are interconnected. The book also benefits from the power of several visual essays by artists to complete the theoretical and empirical chapters which demonstrate different forms of liminality without need of much words. The book will be of interest to researchers and students working in the fields of urban and rural studies, urban sociology, cities and communities, urban and regional planning, urban anthropology, political science, migration studies, human geography, cultural geography, urban anthropology, and visual arts.

Infrastructures of Race

Infrastructures of Race
Author: Daniel Nemser
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2017-05-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1477312609

With case studies that link practices of concentration to the emergence of new racial categories, this groundbreaking book convincingly argues that race was a product of, rather than a starting point for, the spatial politics of colonial rule in Latin Ame

The Indigenous Right to Self-Determination in Extractivist Economies

The Indigenous Right to Self-Determination in Extractivist Economies
Author: Marcela Torres-Wong
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 155
Release: 2023-06-30
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1009410873

International norms widely recognize the Indigenous right to self-determination by which Indigenous peoples define and purse their collective aspirations. Nevertheless, as progressive as legal frameworks might appear, in reality, few Indigenous communities enjoy this right and most remain vulnerable and disempowered. Activists blame Latin America's extractivist economies, while governments argue that extractive revenues are necessary to improve Indigenous life. Far from presenting a unified position, rural Indigenous peoples are most often divided over extractive industries. To assess how Indigenous self-determination has progressed, and the role that extractivism plays in this, this Element examines six Indigenous communities in Mexico, Bolivia, and Peru with contrasting experiences of extractive projects. It finds that the Indigenous ability to use favorable legislation in conjunction with available economic resources shapes different self-determination outcomes. Finally, it assesses Indigenous possibilities for self-determination in the light of environmental activism and discourses on Buen Vivir.