Call for Papers

Collection no. 013: Toxic Infrastructures

Spring 2025

Editors: Nikolaos Olma and Janine Hauer

For decades, infrastructures have been widely seen as the backbone of modernity, a symbol of progress and development, and a manifestation of socio-technical imaginaries and futures. But in the current historical moment, these futures have become increasingly toxic. Not only are infrastructures involved in domesticating, enabling, and mediating toxic flows (Dewan and Sibilia 2023) as part of their regular operating cycles, but they also constitute contaminants themselves as they often consist of toxic materials and heavily treated substances. In this sense, while the purpose of infrastructures is to mitigate risk, they also paradoxically introduce new risks (Howe et al. 2016: 548) in ways that transform “the materials of modernity” into “instruments of slow violence” (Hecht 2018: 130).

This “infrastructural violence” (Rodgers and O’Neill 2012), a result of infrastructures’ turning against themselves and against their intended purposes, must be understood as “planned” (Boehmner and Davies 2018) and indeed inherent to “late industrialism” (Fortun 2012), rather than arising from accidental failure, as an emphasis across the literature on disasters would suggest. Neglect, deferred maintenance, neoliberal cost-saving measures, political (non-)decisions, and lack of accountability, among other factors, all reshape infrastructures in ways that make nuclear disasters, toxic spills, and water crises possible. Infrastructures mobilise elements, molecules, and substances, thereby co-producing toxicity and contamination that are in turn fixed incrementally through the adding of infrastructural layers.

Despite a significant body of work examining the socio-ecological damage produced by the workings of complex infrastructural systems, the concept of toxic infrastructures remains undertheorised. And yet, thanks to their centrality and ubiquity in everyday life around the globe, we believe that infrastructures provide a unique lens through which to capture the workings and effects of late industrialism over different scales and “toxic timescapes” (Müller and Ohman Nielsen 2023). This collection on toxic infrastructures thus aims to grasp the entangled, dynamic, yet quotidian relationship between toxicity and infrastructures and the highly complex and multiscalar daily workings that render infrastructures toxic.

We invite papers that tackle the intimate relationship between toxicity and infrastructures, empirically grounding and considering the political, economic, and cultural relations that create and sustain toxic infrastructures across extended spaces and durations. We therefore envisage a collection that will expose new ontological and epistemological frameworks for situating and understanding the deleterious role of infrastructures in late industrialism. In order to reflect and grasp the interconnectedness of various factors shaping our lived experiences and the world around us, we invite contributions to address one or more of the following themes:

• • How are infrastructural systems rendered toxic, and in what ways are ideas about toxicity grounded in everyday realities?
  • What kinds of “toxic relations” do people develop with toxic infrastructures, and how do they negotiate the bodily harm that such toxicity inflicts?
  • How are toxic infrastructures intertwined with colonialism, exploitation, exclusion, and various forms of injustice? What do toxic infrastructures reveal about settler colonialism beyond its usual spaces, and how do they disproportionately impact Indigenous communities?
  • What practices of (un)knowing do stakeholders harness to make toxic infrastructures (in)visible? What forms of activism and resistance are employed by those directly affected by toxic infrastructures?
  • How does a focus on the relationship between infrastructures and toxicity help us to reconsider struggles for or against access to or exit from infrastructures and the often paradoxical relationship between participation and autonomy?

Please send a title, abstract (max. 300 words), and a short biography (max. 100 words) by 29 September to Nikolaos Olma (Nikolaos.Olma@zmo.de) and Janine Hauer (janine.hauer@ethnologie.uni-halle.de). We accept a wide range of formats, including but not limited to short articles, interviews, or multimedia and photographic essays. Please consult the “Guide for Authors” for detailed descriptions of the possible formats: https://roadsides.net/guide-for-authors/.

Authors of conditionally accepted essays will be notified by 7 October 2024. We envisage a hybrid workshop that will be held in Berlin in November, where the selected contributors will be invited to discuss their contributions, either in person or virtually. Final drafts are due by 15 December 2024 and will subsequently undergo a “double-open” peer review. Publication of the issue is scheduled for April 2025.

References:

Boehmer, Elleke and Dominic Davies (eds). 2018. Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban Infrastructure, Literature and Culture. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Dewan, Camelia and Elizabeth A. Sibilia. 2023. “Introduction to Special Issue: ‘Scaled Ethnographies of Toxic Flows’.” Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 42 (1): 5–12.

Fortun, Kim. 2012. “Ethnography in Late Industrialism.” Cultural Anthropology 27 (3): 446–64.

Hecht, Gabrielle. 2018. “Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On Waste, Temporality, and Violence.” Cultural Anthropology 33 (1): 109–41.

Howe, Cymene, Jessica Lockrem, Hannah Appel, Edward Hackett, Dominic Boyer, Randal Hall, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Albert Pope, Akhil Gupta, Elizabeth Rodwell, Andrea Ballestero, Trevor Durbin, Farès el-Dahdah, Elizabeth Long and Cyrus Mody. 2016. “Paradoxical Infrastructures: Ruins, Retrofit, and Risk.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 41 (3): 547–65.

Müller, Simone. M. and May-Brith Ohman Nielsen. 2022. Toxic Timescapes: Examining Toxicity across Time and Space. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. https://ohioopen.library.ohio.edu/oupress/19/

Rodgers, Dennis and Bruce O’Neill. 2012. “Infrastructural Violence: Introduction to the Special Issue.” Ethnography13 (4): 401–12.