Infrastructure has been an important device in the making of modern state borders, as well as in the governing of human and non-human movement across them. Indeed, fences, border posts, railways, highways, bridges, airports, harbours, cables, pipes, and the like, have all been historically implicated in the ways in which space is built and occupied; inhabited by some and bordered from others. In doing so, infrastructure not only transforms the built and natural environments, but also the social, cultural and affective maps of people living in, through and around them. At the same time, infrastructure carries with it a temporal imagination, as it builds on memories of a past and projects hopes and expectations onto a future. In the current moment of regionalization and globalization, infrastructure is often linked to the promise of modernity, development, mobility, circulation, and transborder contact. Here infrastructure is also conceived as networks of trade and circulation that become supranational and reframe the limits of national borders, as shipping trade corridors, fishing reserves or international maritime economic agreements. This panel invites papers dealing with two aspects of infrastructure’s temporality. Firstly, the idea we are currently living in “infrastructural times”, a moment marked by a renewed investment in infrastructural development, particularly in the Global South. In this perspective, we are interested in papers investigating how current infrastructural projects are unfolding on the ground, prompting spatial transformations and environmental change, and engaging discourses of modernity, futurity and mobile living. Secondly, we are interested in exploring “infrastructural time”, that is, the temporality of infrastructure itself. Infrastructure is made to last, and yet it corrodes, decays, pollutes, gets ruined. Here, we invite papers investigating the temporality of infrastructure amidst processes of construction, renovation, upkeep, decay, and ruination.

The deadline is 28th February and the information cna be accessed here:
http://chamconference2021.fcsh.unl.pt/call-for-papers/