Henry Austin
henryaustin@hks.harvard.edu
As the old world falls into ruination and the new struggles to be born, infrastructure technologies emerge as a central arena of political contestation from local disputes to global geopolitical confrontations. In this presentation, I propose three analytical entry points for understanding the politics of infrastructure today. First, I examine processes of infrastructuring through the lens of labour, foregrounding the forms of invisible, promising and precarious work that make and maintain infrastructure. Second, I include in this analysis not only the construction but also the targeted destruction or sabotage of infrastructure by state and non-state actors alike. Third, I engage with the undercurrent of existential threat and dread infrastructure or its destruction can evoke: its ghosts, its monsters, and its capacity to haunt the ruins of modernity. These dimensions, I argue, illuminate infrastructure as a material and imaginative site where sociotechnical imaginaries are forged, contested, and undone. I illustrate this approach with examples from fieldwork on the ruins of modernity around planned or currently built dam sites in East Africa and the declining coal-mining infrastructure in Germany.
Theo Aalders is a Humboldt Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. His research explores the political geographies of infrastructure, focusing on coal mining in Germany, unbuilt hydropower projects in East Africa, labour relations, and sabotage as a radical practice of future-making. He previously worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Bonn and holds a PhD from the School of Global Studies at the University of Gothenburg. He also collaborates with artists and communities to create comics and artworks as tools for research and science communication.
LOCATION:CGIS South, S354 STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20251110T171500Z DTEND:20251110T190000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR