The Aesthetic Life of Infrastructure: Race, Affect, Environment: A critical reading of the unstable structures that organize biological and social life

Join critical infrastructure studies scholars Prof. Rebecca Oh (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Prof. Jessica Hurley (George Mason University), Prof. David Alff (SUNY Buffalo), and Prof. Michael Rubenstein (Stony Brook University) for a roundtable conversation about the volume.

Moderated by Susan Zieger (UCR)

About the book: This timely and radically interdisciplinary volume uncovers the aesthetics and politics of infrastructure. From roads and bridges to harbors and canals, infrastructure is conventionally understood as the public works that allow for the circulation of capital. Yet this naturalized concept of infrastructure, driven by capital’s restless expansion, is haunted by imperial tendencies to occupy territory, extract resources, and organize life. Infrastructure thus undergirds the living nexus of modernity in an ongoing project of racialization, affective embodiment, and environmental praxis. Rather than merely making visible infrastructure’s modes of power, however, the aesthetic life of infrastructure brings literary methods to bear on the interpretive terrain, reading infrastructural space and temporalities to show that their aesthetic and sensorial experience cannot be understood apart from histories of production and political economies.