In this episode we read Deborah Cowen’s 2017 article “Infrastructures of Empire and Resistance”, which was published on January 25, 2017 on the Verso Books Blog.
In this article, Cowen explores the issue of infrastructure by focusing on how relations of power and of force rely on socio-technical systems, including infrastructural systems, which are themselves increasingly the object of struggle.
“At the center of [current] struggles are the systems engineered to order social and natural worlds. Struggles over infrastructure are hardly new, but they are perhaps more ubiquitous, as the world becomes increasingly financialized, securitized, and logistical.”
“Infrastructure is not only a vehicle of domination and violence. It is also a means of transformation. Alternative worlds require alternative infrastructures, systems that allow for sustenance and reproduction.”
“What might it mean to ground citizenship in the material architectures and social relations of alternative infrastructure, instead of the gate/ways of corporations and nation states? Could repairing infrastructure be a means of repairing political life more broadly?”
This text can be accessed via the Verso Blog at www.versobooks.com.
Reference: Cowen, Deborah. “Infrastructures of Empire and Resistance”. Verso Blog, January 25, 2017, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3067-infrastructures-of-empire-and-resistance