Infrastructure and Future Truths ...

All environmental projects operate with a view to the future, whether implicit or explicit. Infrastructure projects, in particular, are both a useful lens for understanding these different views and can be powerful tools for foregrounding some future visions and sidelining others. In a roundtable dr...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: American Anthropological Association 2021
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:unknown
Published: Underline Science Inc. 2022
Subjects:
Online Access:https://dx.doi.org/10.48448/jhr8-vv40
https://underline.io/lecture/59032-infrastructure-and-future-truths
Description
Summary:All environmental projects operate with a view to the future, whether implicit or explicit. Infrastructure projects, in particular, are both a useful lens for understanding these different views and can be powerful tools for foregrounding some future visions and sidelining others. In a roundtable drawing on research from Egypt, Indonesia, the United States, Palestine, Israel, and the Canadian arctic, we will use infrastructure as our touchstone to discuss how certain accounts of the future gain authority while others are discounted. The hopes and fears of both project architects and inhabitants of the landscapes being altered will feature centrally. We will engage with the ways in which infrastructure shapes expectations for future abundance and scarcity of resources. This will include discussion of the roles of mediation and obscuration that infrastructure may play, as well as potential path dependencies that shape decision-making around infrastructure projects. The roundtable will attend closely to ...