Analyzing Infrastructures in the Anthropocene

In: Historical social research: HSR-Retrospective (HSR-Retro) = Historische Sozialforschung, Band 47, Heft 4, S. 7-28

Abstract

This contribution takes the multiple ecological crises as the background to connect discourses on sustainability and infrastructures. It discusses the preservation, development, or disorder of infrastructures by different actors and practices in the context of diverse imaginaries of sustainability. When infrastructures are addressed and scrutinized against different visions of the future, their order-forming elements, dysfunctionalities, and transformation potentials come to the fore. The question of which decisions, translations, and norms are inscribed in infrastructures is of particular importance in the discourses on ecology. Moreover, focusing on the planetary dimensions of the ecological crisis adds particular complexity to the infrastructural analysis. An ecological perspective fundamentally challenges the view of infrastructure, as traditional concepts are no longer able to contribute to necessary planetary solutions. Since struggles for the futures of sustainability are struggles for the modernization and transformation of, as well as control over and through (material, immaterial, planetary), infrastructures, we argue that infrastructures will and should receive special attention in the social sciences and humanities in the future.