CALL FOR PAPERS: Global Infrastructures: Aesthetic Power and Affective Networks in the (Post-)colonial Present

Call for papers. The deadline for submission is September 10, 2024

Since the nineteenth century, an ever-more complex web of roads, railways, airports, oil pipelines, shipping lanes, fibre-optic cables, tunnels, aqueducts, gas networks, and electrical systems sustains and supports modern life. Built above, through and below the ground, infrastructural systems constitute foundational sociotechnical assemblages of modern societies: a series of installations that shape both biological and social life. A number of scholars –working across several disciplines– have begun interrogating the aesthetic dimension of these infrastructural systems, pointing to their ability to induce a “feeling of modernity”.

A collaborative workshop organized by the Institute of Contemporary History at Nova University Lisbon and the University of Bologna, and partially funded by INCA, intends to focus on infrastructures as semiotic and aesthetic vehicles. It promotes a collective investigation of the aesthetic and affective dimension of global infrastructures, emphasizing how it interacts with colonial projects, capitalist ventures, and cultural superstructures. Learn more about the workshop here.

We particularly welcome contributions focusing on questions such as:

• What ideological messages are embedded in different infrastructural systems from the nineteenth century to the present?
• How can historical approaches help us rethink the relationship between global infrastructures, imperialism and ideology?
• What is the affective dimension associated with different infrastructural materials from steel to glass, plastics and concrete?
• What has been the impact of climate change and the ecological crisis on global infrastructures and their aesthetics?
• What aesthetic forms and future-looking imaginaries are embedded in contemporary infrastructures and digital platforms?

Papers dealing with all these aspects are welcome, from an interdisciplinary perspective. Interested scholars are invited to send a long abstract between 300 and 500 words and a short bio to policante@fcsh.unl.pt and/or to mattia.frapporti2@unibo.it by the 10th of September 2024.

The final workshop will take place on November 28th, 2024, at the Nova University of Lisbon. Financial support for travelling and accommodation may be available, especially for independent scholars, doctoral candidates, and early-career researchers.