Wednesday, September 22

Panel 1
Infrastructural Turns and their Agents
4:00 pm – 5:30 pm CEST

Organizers: Elisabeth Kaske (Leipzig U)

This panel explores infrastructures as systems that (help) create spatial formats. Although infrastructures may start off as isolated projects—roads, potable water supplies, railways—over time they turn into interlocking systems designed, run, served, and used by specialized agents. The development of these systems, rather than infrastructures by themselves, creates spatial formats. Periods of replacement, destruction and rebuilding (caused by technological innovations, political revolutions, or warfare), are opportunities to study how such systems are formed, how new agents establish themselves, and how old agents are replaced. This panel therefore explores such “infrastructural turns” not as metatheoretical claims of academic novelty, but as actual empirical shifts. Our approach is actor-focused and knowledge-focused. Questions include: How do new spatial agents perceive path-dependence in spatial and infrastructural systems? How do they combine new technological and political imagination with inherited knowledge? Which old spatial agents are displaced? How are old spatial agents included into a new infrastructural system?

Li Binyao (Leipzig U): So Foreign, so Chinese: Modern Navigation Aids and the Chinese who Encountered them

This paper explores the establishment of a modern navigation aid system in China, by the Marine Department of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service (CMCS) between 1860s – 1940s. By closely examining government bulletins, CMCS’s publications, and newspapers, this study sheds light on the agency of Chinese staff of the Marine Department and emphasizes the indigenous contribution to the Chinese hydrographic knowledge production. This paper argues that Chinese light keepers played an active role in the construction and maintenance process of lighthouses, buoys, and beacons along China’s coastline

Andreas Greiner (GHI Washington):  Infrastructure Systems in Transition: Caravans and Railways in German East Africa

This paper explores the conflicting history of transport in the colony German East Africa (1885/1891–1918, present-day mainland Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi). Because the animal sleeping sickness suspended any use of pack animals, human porterage was the only available means of transport in the region. Since the 1850s, porterage had been a wage-earning profession and the long-distance caravan trade a promising business. By 1900, a decade into colonial rule, about 100,000 porters continued to arrive every year in the coastal towns at the Indian Ocean and despite attempts to emancipate transport from their heads and shoulders, caravan labor remained the engine of trade in German East Africa, as much as it was the engine of colonial occupation and administration.

Focusing on vernacular mobility and its relation to colonial power, this paper engages questions of continuity and change in the transition from the precolonial to the colonial period. It investigates how the infrastructural arrangements of the caravan economy were both contested and coopted by German colonizers. The analysis asks what capacity colonial rule had to transform the established system of circulation through investment in infrastructure, in particular railways. Its aim is to uncover the longevity of vernacular concepts, structures, and practices, and to demonstrate that supposedly “colonial” and “precolonial” modes of mobility were not mutually exclusive in the early 20th century. Rather, it shows that the combination of caravans and railways led to a new infrastructure network in which mechanized and non-mechanized transport complemented each other.

Jamie Monson (Michigan State U): Moving Global Goods on TAZARA in Tanzania and Zambia

The TAZARA railway was constructed in the 1970s with Chinese development assistance to provide a link from the Zambian copperbelt to the ocean port of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. At the time of construction, the planned direction of commodity flows was from the interior to the coast, mirroring the patterns of colonial railways that moved African raw materials to global markets.  Over time, unexpected new patterns of movement in and beyond the railway corridor have been established by farmers, traders and railway porters who have innovated multi-spatial livelihoods. Their labor shows continuities with the past while innovating new social structures in a world of rapidly changing markets and new flows of capital.

Nanny Kim (U Heidelberg): Steam, Sails and Trackers on the Yangzi River, 1880s-1930s

The advent of steamboat services on the Lower, Middle and Upper Changjiang is well documented, but its effects on the traditional water transport is not. This paper explores the insertion of the new technology in terms technological shifts and organizational adaptations.

Participants:

Li Binyao (Leipzig U):

Li Binyao is a Ph.D. student in Projekt A04 “Chinese Engineers and their Spatial Imaginations: Architects of an Interconnected Nation, 1906–1937” at the Collaborative Research Centre 1199 “Processes of Spatialization under the Global Condition”.

Andreas Greiner (GHI Washington):

Andreas Greiner is a research fellow in Global and Transregional History at the GHI Washington. His research specializes in infrastructure networks, their spatiality and materiality in the long 19th and early 20th centuries. He received his PhD in history from ETH Zurich in 2019 where he also worked as a research assistant at the Chair of Modern History. Before joining the GHI in January 2021, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Max Weber Program at the European University Institute in Florence. His first monograph Human Porterage and Colonial State Formation in German East Africa, 1870–1914: Tensions of Transport (forthcoming 2022) explores the shifting role of caravan transport and human porterage in colonial East Africa, unveiling the resilience of precolonial structures in the era of “high imperialism.” His current research project examines the entangled history of intercontinental airline networks in the interwar period.

Jamie Monson (Michigan State U):

Professor Jamie Monson became interested in Africa when she served as an agriculture volunteer for the Peace Corps in rural Kenya in 1980. She then completed her PhD in African History at UCLA, and took her first teaching position at Carleton College in 1991. In 2015, she accepted a position as a Professor of African History in the Department of History and Director of African Studies at Michigan State University. Monson’s early research focus was on agricultural and environmental history of southern Tanzania, and she has also worked on anti-colonial warfare in German East Africa.  In the late 1990s, she began a new research project on the history of the TAZARA railway, built with Chinese development aid in Tanzania and Zambia in the 1960s and 1970s. Her book, Africa’s Freedom Railway, was published by Indiana University Press in 2011. Most recently, Monson has been studying the history of China-Africa relations (and learning Chinese), and frequently performs research in China. Her new project is a study of technology transfer in the history of Chinese development assistance to Africa. A second project that she is also engaged in uses records of visits made by African women’s delegations to China during the Cultural Revolution to examine gendered aspects of civil diplomacy.

Nanny Kim (U Heidelberg)

Nanny Kim has been working on various issue in Chinese transport history since 2001. In her current project, she concentrates on the transport of mint metals from the mines in Southwestern China to the metropolitan mints in Beijing. Her special interest is the investigation of technologies on overland and water transport through Chinese history, relating them to infrastructure, the density of transport and economic systems, and to ecological change. For her master’s degree (Heidelberg University, 1994) Nanny Kim carried out research on late Qing sources and genres, especially on the illustrated magazine Dianshizhai huabao. She wrote her PhD-thesis on images of Korea in Chinese writings during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century at SOAS in London (completed in 2000).

Panel 2

Mobility Infrastructure and Spatial Transformation

6:00 pm – 7:30 pm CEST

Organizers: Geert Castryck (Leipzig U)

Chair: Geert Castryck

Mobility infrastructures such as railroads, highways, or air traffic facilities have been at the heart of state-led modernization projects and were often advertised as facilitators of national integration, economic development, and progress. Space played a crucial part in these projects. Since the 1980s, historians have developed an increased interest in the role of transport infrastructure in consolidating national territories and penetrating imperial spaces. More recently, impulses from fields like environmental history, mobility and border studies, and cultural history have enriched the thinking about space and infrastructures. Building on these trends, our panel explores spatial configurations that have received less attention in historical infrastructure research than prominent ones like nation-states, colonies, and empires. More specifically, it sheds light on environments, borderlands, and transit zones – spaces that have also been created, co-produced, or transformed by mobility infrastructures and the connections and disconnections they entail. The three speakers on this panel present case studies from American and European history of the twentieth century. Besides sketching out the space-making effects of infrastructural visions and planning, the papers also engage with actors – travelers, migrants, residents – on an everyday level. They also consider how actors experienced and/or shaped infrastructures and how the latter (were) affected (by) related spaces.

Miriam Pfordte (Leipzig U): Between Worlds. Users’ Perspectives on Mobility Infrastructure during the Cold War

When the Iron Curtain was drawn across Germany after the end of World War II, residents of until then socially and infrastructurally closely connected spaces along the newly created border suddenly found themselves on the territorial periphery of newly defined states. On the eastern side, a five-kilometre-wide restricted area was established, which could be entered only by residents and permit holders. On the western side, a “Zonenrandgebiet” (zonal border area) was created that, despite a considerable amount of border tourism and numerous state subventions, was perceived by local politicians and residents as being cut off from traffic and thus economically marginalized. Spatial transformations of this kind provoke discussions and are reflected in the spatial perception of the persons living in the area. After all, infrastructural changes intervene in the everyday life of their users and are therefore not only (geo)political instruments but also the focus of social negotiation of space and society. A look at how local society deals with infrastructural disruptions can thus serve as a window to explore long-term social as well as spatial development and to take a differentiated look at dynamics between politics and society. Taking into account the particular material characteristics of mobility infrastructures in West and East German contexts, this paper investigates how the interruption and rearrangement of transport infrastructures cutting directly into the everyday life of the population in the course of the Cold War influenced spatialization processes on the user side: How did these transportation disruptions and rearrangements affect perceptions of the border region within the region; and how did it outside of the region? How did self-perception and perception by others relate to each other? What are long-term consequences for the regions on both sides of the former inner-German border?

Carolin Liebisch-Gümüş (GHI Washington): Airport Infrastructure as Border Infrastructure: Transit Zones as a Spatial Format of the later 20^th Century

Airports – the key element of aviation infrastructure – have complex spatial relations. Far from being “non-places,” they are linked to their regional and urban surroundings, to transnational spheres created by global traffic flows, and to the boundaries of the nation-state. Historians have only recently begun to explore the role of airports in the shaping of different socio-spatial contexts. This paper focuses on their role as border spaces. By doing so, the paper sheds light on the intersection of two infrastructure projects – aviation infrastructure and the national/supranational border infrastructure. How did planners and policymakers, who organized global air traffic in the second half of the twentieth century, cope with the demand for national control over mobility flows? Which visions, competing interests, and specific strategies shaped the construction of the airport border? Based on sources from international organizations and European case studies (esp. Frankfurt/Main), the paper highlights the creation and relevance of a small but powerful spatial format at the heart of the airport terminal: the transit zone. Transit zones differed from other borders through their unique filter function exempting some travelers from national control, while subjecting others to immigration checks, immobilization, or even detention. What also made the transit zone special is its paradoxical character as it was both a spatially confined place, and a legal status (“fiction of non-entry”) that became detached from its original place at the airport terminal. Besides sketching out the policy side, the paper also addresses the question how different groups of passengers – especially migrants – experienced and navigated that peculiar space.

Mario Peters (GHI Washington): ‘Recreational Wonderlands for Automobilists’: Infrastructure, Environment, and Spatial Transformation in the Americas in the 1920s

In the 1920s, the United States, Canada, and Brazil saw a significant increase in automobiles and the rise of full-fledged car cultures. Car ownership rates were much higher in the US and Canada, but initiatives toward the construction of infrastructure for leisure driving and the transformation of urban and rural spaces into recreational wonderlands for motorists gained momentum in all three countries. In North America, such initiatives flourished all over the continent, especially in National Parks and Forests. In Brazil, the southeastern states of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo offered spectacular landscapes and saw the construction of the nation’s most iconic tourist roads. Over the last two decades, US-American historians have approached automobility, roads, and their space-making effects through the lens of environmental history. Historians of Canada and Brazil have only recently started to explore the importance of environmental concerns in the history of mobility. My paper seeks to advance this research by discussing processes of spatial transformation brought by the creation of recreational infrastructures for automobilists in North America and Brazil from a transnational perspective. In the first part, I will outline how the early development of road building and automobile tourism was closely connected to the refashioning of remote areas into accessible and designed landscapes; in the second part, special attention will be given to leisure motorists. Through the analysis of travelogues, written by automobilists who ventured upon long-distance trips, the paper explores how these actors experienced the landscapes they drove through. I will also discuss if and how they played a crucial role in the promotion of automotive infrastructure and the production of ‘car-friendly nature’ (Wells 2012).

Participants:

Geert Castryck (Leipzig U)

Geert Castryck is a historian specialized in African and global history. He published on African urban history, Islam in East and Central Africa, colonialism, and colonial legacies. Since 2016 he works at the Collaborative Research Centre “Processes of Spatialization under the Global Condition” (SFB 1199) at Leipzig University. In the academic year 2015-16, he was visiting professor in African history at Ghent University. Current research projects include a global urban history of Kigoma/Ujiji (today Tanzania) and a history of the redefinition of space in East and Central Africa as well as in Europe during and after the Scramble for Africa.

Miriam Pfordte (Leipzig U)

As a PhD-candidate at the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB 1199), “Processes of Spatialization under the Global Condition”, Miriam Pfordte is member of the research project “The ‘Iron Curtain’ between Static Spaces and Fluid Networks. Exclusion and (Re)Connection, 1960-2010” (B09). She holds a master’s degree in medieval and modern History from Leipzig University and was previously employed as a research assistant at the Saxon Academy of Science and Humanities in Leipzig and the chair for history of the 19th to 21st century at Leipzig University. Her research interests include the history of infrastructures, material culture, and Cold War history.

Carolin Liebisch-Gümüş (GHI Washington)

Carolin Liebisch-Gümüş is a Research Fellow at the GHI Washington. Her research interests include global and international history, migration and mobility. She received her PhD from the University of Heidelberg in 2018 with a thesis on the entangled relationship between Turkish nation-building and the League of Nations in the interwar period. In the past, she has also worked as a lecturer at the University of Kiel and spent time abroad at the Orientinstitut Istanbul and the University of Chicago. In her current book project, she investigates the role of air routes and airports in the history of refugee migration from the 1930s to the 1990s.

Mario Peters (GHI Washington)

Mario Peters is a research fellow in American and transatlantic history at the German Historical Institute Washington. Prior to this position he was a Feodor Lynen postdoctoral fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and visiting scholar at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Before that he worked as assistant professor and taught Latin American and Caribbean history at Leibniz University Hanover. He is the author of Apartments for Workers. Social Housing, Segregation, and Stigmatization in Urban Brazil (2018). His current research interests are spread across the intersection of mobility studies, environmental history, and the study of Inter-American relations.

Thursday, 23 September

Panel 3

Development Dreams: Reformatting of Social and Economic Space through Dam Construction

10:00 am –  11:30 am

Organizers: Aurelia Ohlendorf & Uwe Müller (GWZO Leipzig)

Chair: Uwe Müller

Comment: Klaus Gestwa (U Tübingen)

Dams or hydroelectric power stations are multifunctional large construction projects that require a high degree of central planning. The implementation of such infrastructural projects has always been attributed with enormous hopes. As multifunctional infrastructures they promise not only to provide a large amount of electric energy, which is supposed to facilitate economic growth and industrialization; but they also have the potential to transform agriculture through extensive irrigation and change the infrastructural net of inland water transportation through new, navigable waterways – so the ambitious visions of technocrats and planners. In addition, these construction projects shape and transform regional economic and social spaces with a growing net of supportive infrastructure, accelerated urbanization and the development of industries depending on or supporting the power station. Historiographic analysis shows that on a meta-level hydrologic construction projects require international cooperation, technological exchange and economic cooperation. They were common development aid projects during the Cold War and can thus shed light on East-South as well as West-South cooperation in the second half of the 20^th century. Whether it is the World Bank financing dam construction, the US-American Tennessee-Valley-Authority going global or the Soviet Union offering ‘scientific technological support’ to the Global South: planning and implementation of dams was part of the competition between western and eastern social systems as well as a highly cooperative endeavor with the potential of shaping and reshaping spatial formats.

Birte Förster (U Bielefeld): “Fifty-one Miles of Progress”: Imagined and Actual Spatialization through Colonial Infrastructures

In my talk I refer to the relationship between infrastructures to spatial formats in a specific historical setting, namely during the process of decolonisation in French and British colonies in Africa after the Second World War. My cases studies – high dams in Uganda, Ghana, French Cameroon and Guinea – were all planned, but not all of them built during the colonial period. Concerning the topic of this conference, three more general observations can be made: Firstly, their imagined spatialization, which is evident from the planning documents for these infrastructures, is closely linked to more general ideals of economic development and modernisation. Secondly, this spatialization rarely occurs as originally intended. Thirdly, colonialism is by definition an asymmetric spatial order. This asymmetry, has a decisive impact on whether infrastructures can be inherently capable of changing spatial formats or are more likely to perpetuate them.

Daniel Rothenburg (U Tübingen): The Making and Re-making of Australia’s ‘Food Bowl’ in the 20^th Century Through Hydrologic Infrastructure

Australia’s irrigation regions are textbook examples of revolutionary re-spatialization through infrastructure. In the 20^th century, irrigation was hailed as the primary means to claim the continent for an emerging nation. With the aid of US capital and know-how, large-scale dams and irrigation systems were constructed by state agencies with broad community support to facilitate European settlement. The guiding vision was a closely populated Australia with white, hard-working rural communities in a transformed environment unconstrained by ecological conditions. With the necessary infrastructure, the ostensibly ‘useless’ landscape was reformatted radically to establish new environmental, economic and social spaces under the auspices of irrigation. The country’s largest irrigation region – the Goulburn-Murray Irrigation District (GMID) in the south-east – is a useful example to delineate this revolutionary making and re-making of space through hydrologic infrastructure.

The GMID was established between 1900 and 1950. Its precondition was the dispossession of the region’s original inhabitants, leaving the newcomers with the freedom to transform it. By constructing its irrigation system, comprising a vast network of channels to carry water from reservoirs to farms, a new Cartesian geometry was created, overlaying, and partially replacing the natural curves of waterways. With little to no regard for traditional settlement patterns or land-use, white agricultural communities were established. While their principal lifeline was their access to the irrigation network and publicly subsidized water, these new social and economic spaces were also dependent on the establishment of all-new road and telephone networks, electricity grids, recreation facilities, and public services. This, for a time, created growing and prosperous family farming communities making a living from dairy and horticulture, with extensive milk, cheese, and fruit canning industries.

However, since the 1960s an escalating ecological crisis threatened the GMID’s future. Salinization of soils and water, a by-product of excessive water use by irrigators, prompted a re-making of its irrigation system. Evaporation basins were added to dispose of saline drainage water. Whole streams were isolated to reduce the saline pollution of the irrigation system. Water use, which previously had been unmeasured and unrestricted, became closely monitored, and market-based distribution was introduced to retain the irrigation district’s viability and hence its communities. In the early 21^st century, the GMID is still a viable business enterprise and important food producer. Nevertheless, in the age of water as a commodity and farming as a highly competitive business, its agricultural communities are still in a process of profound transformation.

Aurelia Ohlendorf (GWZO Leipzig): Afghanistan in the 1960s: Spatial Formatting through Soviet Infrastructures

In Afghanistan of the 1950s and 1960s, competing ambitions for economic development in the context of the Cold War concentrated as hardly anywhere else. In the hitherto infrastructurally scarcely developed geographical space between the newly formed Pakistan, the southern border of the Central Asian Soviet republics and Iran, the Afghan government under Prime Minister Mohammed Daoud Khan cooperated with both the United States and the Soviet Union to form new economic, social and agricultural spaces with the help of (hydrological) infrastructure projects. On the one hand, the north of the country, enhanced by infrastructural expansion, became closer connected to the Soviet Union and the economy was geared towards exporting to the northern neighbor; whereas on the other hand, the Americans’ sphere of influence was concentrated to the south of the country. Here, American engineers tried to transform the Helmand and Arghandab river basins into a prosperous agricultural area through the construction of dams, irrigation canals and settlement measures, following the example of the Tennessee Valley Authority.

This paper examines the Soviet Union’s economic and technical cooperation with Afghanistan from the mid-1950s to the 1970s, focusing on the role of infrastructure in the Soviet model of development and its potential to transform and shape space. Infrastructures constituted an essential part of the socialist development model offered to the Afghan government in the 1960s in the form of financial, technical, and material support. Hydroelectricity and irrigation played a particularly central role in their cooperation for two reasons: on the one hand, Afghanistan became a site of competing approaches to modernization and economic development in the context of the Cold War, which particularly focused on water development. On the other hand, the obsession with hydroelectricity and irrigation as engines for development can also be explained by the intra-Soviet experience. The export of technology and expertise in the construction of dams, hydropower plants and canals can thus be interpreted as a consequence of the hydrological decade in late Stalinism and as a technology transfer from the country’s own southern Soviet republics, where dam construction and irrigation had been increasingly tested as keys to economic development since the 1940s.

The Tajik, Uzbek, Turkmen and Kazakh Soviet republics were propagated by hydrological experts and the press as models for the socialist path of development. Formerly backward regions had successfully been transformed into modern industrial regions thanks to the socialist order and state-controlled water management projects, the message went. The paper shows that Afghanistan became an early target for the export of this development model. The construction of hydropower plants in Naghlu and Pol-e-Khumri as well as the irrigation project in Jalalabad will serve as case studies. Not only did new economic and agricultural spaces unfold in the immediate vicinity of the construction sites, but the numerous Soviet infrastructure projects as a whole contributed to a spatial reorientation of the Afghan export economy away from its eastern neighbors Pakistan and India towards the Soviet Union in the north. In this sense, infrastructures can be read as media of spatialization processes in the Global Cold War.

Participants:

Uwe Müller (GWZO Leipzig):

Uwe Müller studied history at Leipzig University and gained a PhD in economic history at the Humboldt University of Berlin. His research interests include the economic history of East Central Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with a special focus on the integration of this region in the European and world economy and the development of transport infrastructures.

Klaus Gestwa (U Tübingen):

Klaus Gestwa is a German historian and the director of the East European Institute for History and Regional Studies at the Eberhard Karl University of Tübingen. He is the forth chair holder of the professorship for East European History at Tübingen University.

Birte Förster (U Bielefeld):

Birte Förster is a historian and the academic councilor of the historical science department at the University of Bielefeld. Her current main research topics are infrastructure history, history of decolonization, current political history, gender history and media history.  She is doing her research at “Global History- Translocal history of interrelation” at Bielefeld University in the field of power history of the decolonialization of Africa. Also, she is a member of the collaborative research center “Methods of Comparison“. She is writing for the FAZ, the SZ and DIE ZEIT. In her book 1919 – A continent invents itself in a new way (Reclam 2018) she describes the complex developments and uprising’s of this year.

Daniel Rothenburg (U Tübingen):

Daniel Rothenburg is a research associate at the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB): “Threatened Order” at the University of Tübingen. His doctoral dissertation is concerned with the transformation of farming communities in Victoria through increasing soil and water salinity with an interest in social change, environmental attitudes and activism.

Aurelia Ohlendorf (GWZO Leipzig):

Aurelia Ohlendorf studied Russian, history and economic studies in Tübingen between 2013 and 2019 with a study visit at the Herzen State Pedagogical University St. Petersburg. From 2015 to 2016 she held a scholarship “Metropolises in Eastern Europe” from the German National Academic Foundation. In 2019 she was the press officer of the foundation Berlin Wall for the event program “30 Jahre Mauerfall”. Since May 2020 she is a researcher at GWZO in the subproject “Socialist development models for the Third World” of Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 1199: “Processes of Spatialization under the Global Condition”.

Panel 4

Innovation, Periphery, Accessibility: Firms and the Global Knowledge Economy at the Edge of the World

4:00 pm –  6:00 pm CEST

Organizers: Marian Augustina Brainoo, Markus Sattler & Thilo Lang (IfL Leipzig)

With the rise of the internet economy and new opportunities for communication, there have been long-lasting hopes for a more just economy with widespread access to knowledge and information. The ‘death of distance’ (Cairncross 1997) and hopes for a ‘flattening world’ (Friedman 2005), however, did not materialize as expected, and commentators claimed there are still ‘mountains in a flat world’ (Rodríguez-Pose, Crescenzi 2008). With increasing digitalization in the past years, again hopes for a boost in economic development were projected to regions like Sub-Sahara Africa and Central Asia/ South Caucasus – the latter in particular in the light of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

In this panel, we want to discuss, how innovation and successful entrepreneurship takes place at ‘the edge of the world’ (Mbembe 2000), and how firms manage to integrate in today’s global knowledge economy or develop alternative imaginations of globalization (Helbrecht et al 2021). Regions and places, that we identify as being peripheral at global, macro-regional and national scales, and poorly linked into globalized infrastructural networks, are home to innovative and internationally active companies. How do entrepreneurs in these places relate to their locations? And how do they perceive their position in a globalized economic system? After introducing some general perspectives on the discursive dimensions of globalization and macro-regional perspectives to innovation, we want to discuss these questions with firm representatives from Sub-Sahara Africa and Central Asia/ South Caucasus.

Sami Moisio (U of Helsinki): The Expansion of Knowledge-Based Economy beyond the “Core”

In knowledge-intensive capitalism, constitutive imaginaries produce a new geopolitical drama of harsh inter-spatial competition on a global scale and divide the world and states into ”zones” in terms of their potential in surplus value creation in the “global” knowledge-economy. Knowledge-intensive capitalism both produces and is based on spatial hierarchies, and the constant imposing of the knowledge-based economy ideal/model to new geographical and social spaces is constitutive of global dominance. In other words, the knowledge-based economy is supported and furthered by powerful economic actors and its geographical expansion is a notable geopolitical phenomenon. In this presentation, I discuss the constant integration of new spaces and populations into the knowledge-based economy through the prism of colonialism/modernity. In such a perspective, one of the key challenges is to analyze the operations of knowledge-economy beyond the global North. In this presentation, I raise questions such as “what kind of spatial and social forms does the knowledge-based economy take across different geographical contexts and with what consequences”?

Javier Revilla Diez (U Köln): The Growth Corridor Vision and its Realities: Insights into Regional Economic Impacts in Namibia and Tanzania

Growth corridors are currently among the most popular spatial development initiatives in Africa. Corridor planning is meant to mobilise private and public stakeholders to create a critical mass of investment and goes hand in hand with a promise of modernity and economic growth (Gálvez Nogales & Webber, 2017). However, scholars increasingly criticize a salient gap between vision and reality as well as the general underpinnings of corridor paradigms (Chome et al., 2020; Kaarhus, 2018).

Based on the case studies of the Walvis Bay-Ndola-Lubumbashi Development Corridor (WBNLDC) and the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT), this contribution contrasts the vision and reality of both corridors by focusing on two particular value chains: agriculture and tourism. Our results show that both tangible (e.g. roads, railways, bridges) and more tacit (e.g. flow of finance) corridor-features have affected everyday economic practices as they take shape and materialise in specific spaces and along specific value chains. Nevertheless, for both corridor initiatives, a lack of (visible) implementation as well as a selectiveness to the favour of few value chains and chain actors is an existential challenge that threatens their political, social and economic legibility. We begin by outlining imaginaries of corridor-making and their expected benefits in the African context. With regard to our two case studies, we then reflect on these expectations through a value chain perspective. Ultimately, the tension between corridor vision and reality is addressed, which helps to understand where and for whom corridors unfold. The contribution is based on joint work with Peter Dannenberg, Gideon Hartmann, Carolin Hulke, Linus Kalvelage (UoC) and Richard Mbunda (University of Dar es Salaam).

Markus Sattler & Marian Brainoo (IfL Leipzig): Innovative Enterprises in ‘Peripheral’ Locations in Sub-Sahara Africa and Central Asia/ South Caucasus

This presentation focuses on the opportunities, challenges, openings and closures to identify potentially innovative companies in Sub-Sahara Africa and South Caucasus/Central Asia. Departing from various theoretical models on innovation systems, innovation ecosystems, national and regional innovation models, and the nascent field of peripheral innovation, we identified various entry points for a systematic search strategy of potentially innovative enterprises. However, our internal critique of these models suggests possibilities of various capitalocentric, Global North-centric, S&T-centric and city-centric blind spots of these approaches that are unable to grasp the diversity of potentially innovative companies and practices. Therefore, we specifically aimed to identify organizations that foster frugal, social and ecological innovation or that have a mission to promote regional development. We will shortly discuss the openings and closures of the aforementioned models for identifying potentially innovative companies with reference to selected countries in terms of their company locations. The analysis has, we argue, implications for future research on innovation eco-sytems. We posit that future research should be less driven by the imperatives identified in the Northern literature aimed exclusively at the successful commercialization of innovation. Such an approach would ultimately lead to conceive the institutional environment in terms of lack and deficit to a (capitalist) Northern standard.

Elkanah Delalom (Oomph Boost Media, Ghana): Firm Development, International Market Access and Trans-Local Knowledge Practices

The company Oomph Boost Media believes that there is a better way to do online marketing. A more valuable, less invasive way where customers are earned rather than bought. They are passionate about it, and their mission is to help people achieve it. The company focuses on online marketing, web applications and managements. It is one of the least understood and least transparent aspects of great marketing and management, and they see that as an opportunity: Online marketing is an investment not a cost and Oomph Boost Media is excited to help simplify it.

Irakli Dolidze (FreezeTea/ Caucasan, Kharagauli, Georgia): Firm Development,Iinternational Market Access and Trans-Local Knowledge Practices

Headquartered in Kharagauli, one of the most productive growing regions in Georgia, Caucasan has been engaged in the collection, processing and export of medicinal and culinary herbs, teas, wild berries, and fruits since 1995. Relying on environmentally pristine growing environments, sustainable collection practices, and increasing numbers of farmers obtaining organic certification, the company has grown, increasing exports to new markets including Middle East, EU, and Southeast Asia. In 2019, besides the bulk export, the company also started to produce retail products for private and white labels. Caucasan’s team is oriented on producing high quality traditional rural products and offering them to the global market in new forms. They aim to increase the accessibility of healthy and organic rural products by using the innovative technologies of production.

Participants:

Sami Moisio (U of Helsinki):

Professor Sami Moisio works on the interface of regional studies, human geography, spatial planning and political economy. Sami’s research interests include state spatial transformation, political geographies of Europeanization, city-regionalism, political geographies of economic geography, and knowledge-intensive capitalism. Much of his current research is concerned with the ways in which different places, regions, spaces (such as the “global”) and human subjects are constituted, transformed and re-worked in political-economic processes and struggles, including knowledge production. Sami’s recent book Geopolitics of the Knowledge-based Economy won the Regional Studies Association Routledge Best Book Award in 2019. He serves as an external faculty board member of the Gran Sasso Science Institute: School of Advanced Studies (Italy).

Javier Revilla Diez (U Köln):

Since April 2014, Revilla Diez is full professor of human geography chair and head of the working group “Economic Geography and Global South” at the Institute of Geography at the University of Cologne, Germany. He was appointed within the framework of the key profile area “Socio-economic, Cultural, and Political Transformations in the Global South” of  the Global South Studies Center at the University of Cologne, supported by the German Excellence Initiative. Before, Revilla Diez was full professor of economic geography at the Institute for Economic and Cultural Geography, Leibniz University of Hanover. He is a member of the advisory board of the Lower Saxonian Institute for Economic Research (Niedersächsisches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung). Revilla Diez graduated in geography from the Leibniz University of Hanover (1991) with minors in economics, regional planning and hydrology. In 1995, he received his PhD from the University of Hanover analyzing regional transformation processes in Vietnam. In 2001, he finished his “Habilitation” on metropolitan innovation systems in Europe. Between 1991 and 2002, he was employed at the University of Hanover. From 2002 until 2006 he was Professor (C3) at the Department of Geography at the Christian-Albrechts-University in Kiel. After his PhD on the economic and regional transformation processes in Vietnam, he focused on knowledge-based regional development (especially regional innovation systems) and vulnerability research in Europe and Asia. Recently he worked on regional growth in the Greater Pearl River Delta (China), on economic restructuring and responses to crisis in rural Vietnam/Thailand, and Tsunami risks, vulnerability and resilience in the Phang-Nga Province, Thailand. His research publications have appeared in, among others, World Development, Regional Studies, Environment and Planning A, Technovation, European Planning Studies, International Regional Science Review, Papers in Regional Science, Natural Hazards, and Applied Geography.

Markus Sattler (IfL Leipzig):

Markus Sattler studied political science, geography and international relations in Bremen, Berlin and Potsdam. He is mainly interested in the contested economies of the “Global East”. Since 2020, he is working at the IfL.

Marian Brainoo (IfL Leipzig):

Marian Augustina Brainoo studied economics specialising in innovation and change. She is interested in entrepreneurship and innovation studies in sub-Saharan Africa. Since 2020, she is working at the IfL.

Elkanah Delalom (Oomph Boost Media, Ghana)

Irakli Dolidze (FreezeTea/ Caucasan, Kharagauli, Georgia)

Panel 5

Bridges or Barriers? Infrastructures as Media of the Coding of Spaces and Social Relation

6:30 pm –  8:00 pm CEST

Organizers: Krischan Bockhorst, Miriam Pfordte & Dirk van Laak (Leipzig U)

Since the industrial take-off of the 19th century, which brought rationalization and mechanization to ever-wider parts of European society, public service facilities have often been regarded as a characteristic criterion of modernization and progress.

However, debates about infrastructures – their construction, maintenance, functionality or utility – can also shed light on fundamental social developments as well as conflicts of interest, as infrastructures create and materialize social relations and path dependencies in space. They determine economic, social, or political inclusion and exclusion; they hierarchize spaces and communities by establishing preferred spheres of centralized provision as well as peripheries of gradually attenuated connection (or even exclusion).

The public negotiation of infrastructural facilities is thus also a negotiation process of social identity or the acceptance or rejection of dominant narratives and spatial constructions, e.g.: phenomena such as US segregation, which was also materially reflected in discriminatory access to infrastructure for people of color, or so-called “redlining,” the decisive role of railroads in the era of imperialism, the divisive effects of the “Iron Curtain,” the feminist urban critique of recent decades, or the ongoing debate about the hierarchization of individual strands of infrastructure in the wake of the Covid 19 pandemic.

From both historical and contemporary perspectives, the panel invites the audience to explore the following questions through numerous international case studies:

• What impact do the space-shaping properties of infrastructure have on hierarchies within social and spatial relations, either integrating or dividing, building bridges or erecting barriers?
• Where has infrastructure been and is being used as a tool to create or break long-term dependencies or to rethink and reorder space?
• How are infrastructures hierarchized among themselves (in times of crisis) and what statements can be read from this for the self-understanding of social groups, national communities?
• What practices are associated with spatial and social hierarchization, with processes of separation and inclusion/exclusion through infrastructures?

Jan Hansen (HU Berlin/USC): Making Los Angeles ‘Modern’: Infrastructure and the Spatialization of Social Relations, 1860 to 1900

This paper analyzes how the residents of Los Angeles established, transformed, and hierarchized social relations in the use of water infrastructures from 1860 to 1900. Applying a micro-historical perspective and a praxeological approach, the paper moves the consumers of infrastructure to the center of analysis and views infrastructure as a key to understanding the functioning of societies. Los Angeles is a significant space of investigation. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, Los Angeles appeared as a hemispheric place, with large Mexican, Chinese, and Indigenous populations. Connected to this multiethnicity, two major water systems developed in parallel: the Zanja system composed of open ditches, which dated from the Mexican era before 1850, and the underground system laid by American engineers after 1864. The case of Los Angeles is particularly revealing because the Zanja system continued to grow even after closed pipes were installed.

In this paper, I argue that the coexistence of the two networks with their respective space-shaping properties should be interpreted in connection with the struggles for social hierarchization in semi-arid Los Angeles. By the end of the century, it was by no means decided whether Euro-American migrants with their understanding of infrastructure (and the related concepts and practices of social order) would prevail in Los Angeles, or whether Mexican inhabitants would be able to assert their specific water traditions and practices. While Euro-Americans sought to commodify water as a resource, Mexican inhabitants desperately sought to maintain free access to water at the ditches. As a result, everyday life with water infrastructures in Los Angeles very much was a struggle over the creation and materialization of social relations. The paper considers these social negotiation processes through an investigation into the conflicting simultaneity of ditches and pipes, focusing on the spatialization of processes of inclusion and exclusion, integration and division. In doing so, the paper expands existing research that has not yet systematically considered the co-constitution of the use of infrastructure and various societies.

Andrea Protschky (TU Darmstadt): Staying under Bridges, Negotiating Barriers: Infrastructure Practices of Unhoused Berliners between Socio-Spatial Exclusion and Spaces of Care and Support

In a social context in which most basic infrastructures (water, energy, to some extent also communication) are used inside apartments and/or have to be paid for (including mobility), the access of unhoused persons to infrastructure is severely impeded. In this situation, persons who live on the street or stay in emergency shelters at night practice different ways of infrastructure usage. They access basic infrastructures for instance through social organizations or shops or replace them with partly improvised solutions. In addition, they reuse basic infrastructures, like bridges or public transport to stay dry or warm. Based on first results of a study on infrastructure practices of unhoused persons in Berlin, this contribution explores how their interaction with infrastructure reflects, shapes and constitutes socio-spatial in- and exclusions. The infrastructure practices unveil instances of socio-spatial exclusion, for example when persons lack the financial means to access public bathrooms. In many cases, however, the practices are marked by partial exclusion and marginality, as in the formal exclusion from and informal use of public transport without a ticket, which entails a constant risk of being penalized or even imprisoned. Finally, the lives of unhoused Berliners also strongly rely on the inclusion in socio-spatial networks that enable the use or replacement of infrastructure, like the upkeep of a shared camp with cooking, cleaning and energy facilities.

This perspective on unhoused persons’ infrastructure practices aims to enrich the existing research on homelessness, which has paid much attention to the concentration of services in marginalized urban areas, revanchist public space politics and, more recently, on practices and spaces of care. Focusing on the use and replacement of infrastructures sheds light on central needs of unhoused persons and their socio-spatial and socio-temporal interconnections. Understanding these practices within a continuum of in- and exclusions enables to draw a nuanced picture of social and spatial exclusion and marginality, but also spaces of care and mutual support that characterize the daily lives of unhoused urbanites. This ambivalent description might look less alarming than a single focus on punitive space politics, but makes visible constant negotiations of infrastructure use and an accompanying uncertainty which make everyday life very draining. From the perspective of infrastructure research, the analysis highlights the precarious infrastructure access within a supposedly ubiquitously supplied society and the reuse of infrastructure spaces – which partly rely on organizational, public or peer support and spatial organization as well as unhoused persons’ own improvisation.

Mathias Hack (Leipzig U): Inviting Tourists, Excluding Locals?: A Note on Tourism and Infrastructure in East Africa

National parks are a key feature in wildlife tourism. This is especially true for East Africa. After independence in the 1960s, the postcolonial governments of Kenya and Tanzania invested massively, often supported by development aid, in infrastructure and services that made nature and wildlife accessible for western tourists. Local residents were not able to use roads and transport systems in the same way as tourists, but engaged these types of infrastructure in many different ways. The presentation will show that infrastructures, which have a special emphasis on providing services for tourists, are deeply involved in space-shaping processes and the discussion of social relations in the mentioned countries. This is also true for failing, missing or non-existent tourist infrastructure.

Participants:

Jan Hansen (HU Berlin/UCLA)

Jan Hansen is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Humboldt University Berlin and a Feodor Lynen Fellow at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on the United States and Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, with particular interests in the histories of infrastructure, the environment, and urban history. He is currently working on a second book project (Habilitation) dealing with the everyday appropriation of water and energy infrastructures from 1850 to 1940. His previous work includes research into social movements, with a special emphasis on anti-nuclear protests during the Cold War.

Andrea Protschky (TU Darmstadt)

Andrea Protschky is a doctoral researcher at the Department of Urban Sociology and Sociology of Space at the Technical University of Darmstadt and at the Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning at Utrecht University. She is a member of the Research Training Group KRITIS (Critical infrastructures: construction, functional crises and protection in cities) at the Technical University of Darmstadt. Holding a bachelor’s degree in metropolitan culture and a master’s degree in urban design, her research interests include the spatiality and temporality of social inequalities, housing and homelessness and infrastructure practices.

Matthias Hack (Leipzig U)

Mathias Hack studied history at Leipzig University and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He is currently working on a PhD-project entitled (Time-)Travelling to Eastern Africa. Tourism in Kenya and Tanzania 1970-2000. Besides the history of tourism, his research interests include German colonial history, postcolonial studies and contemporary Spanish history.

Friday, 24 September

Panel 6

Digital Infrastructures: Infrastructuring the Digital?

9:00 am – 10:30 am CEST

Organizers: Srividya Balasubramanian, Moritz Dolinga, Ursula Rao & Sarah-Ruth Sippel (Leipzig U)

Studying something through an infrastructure lens means looking at things, components, or practices of the social world as they fulfil certain key – infrastructuring – functions. One such key function is the capacity of infrastructures to make other things possible; they enable the flow of goods, people, or ideas across space (Larkin 2013) and act as important facilitators in society (Bernards & Campbell-Verduyn 2019). Moving beyond a purely materialistic view on infrastructures, this panel shifts the focus from infrastructure’s ontologies to its potentialities, and proposes digitization as a starting point for this conceptual shift. We are specifically interested in the infrastructuring functions of digital technologies and their capacities to transform and (re)combine the social, political, technical, and biological in new ways. We approach the relationship between digitization and infrastructures from a dual perspective: (1) how/when/why digital technologies (might) become infrastructures; and (2) how digitization itself can be seen as a process of infrastructuring, where different, previously unrelated, parts of the world are translated into data and brought into a new flow, connection, communication, or relationship with one another. Papers in this panel are hence invited to address one or more of the following themes:

• Under which conditions can digital technologies fulfil infrastructuring functions? In connecting or translating parts of the world in new (different) ways, what distinguishes digital infrastructures from analogue infrastructures, and what are their specific qualities and space making capacities?
• If we understand digitization as a process of active infrastructuring – i.e. creating new forms of connection and interrelation – how does this help us to theorize from observations on the digitization of the state, health, farming, or the creation of ‘smart’ urban spaces? Does this help us to better understand (or can we conceptually expand on) who the actors are, and what kind of aspirations and visions guide them, beyond solely securitization and control? How do transformations onset by digital networks disrupt or unsettle the power field in which they may (or may not) find themselves in and what forms of (re)assembling follow?
• What kind of new spatializations emerge from digital infrastructuring, such as the linking of unlikely domains, territorializing effects, or characteristically changing the spaces in which they operate (i.e. spatial formats and orders – what lasts, what is fleeting, and what remains)? And how does digital infrastructuring change the nature of what it connects (new ontologies)?

Ayona Datta (London): The Shadow Pandemic: Intimate Infrastructures of COVID-19 in a Digital Urban Age

During the COVID-19 crises, digital infrastructures have formed the building blocks of the Indian State’s ‘technological solutionism’ towards tracking, tracing and managing the virus. This has nonetheless exacerbated the struggles in what Val Plumwood called the ‘shadow places’ of development – in the slums, resettlement colonies, low-income and informal neighbourhoods. My argument in this paper is that in a year of lockdowns, social distancing and uncertainty, a ‘shadow pandemic’ has emerged across two connected scales – domestic and regional. The first is the most intimate space of a pandemic, which produces an exacerbation of gender-based marginalizations in the home through broken links between social, economic and political dimensions of everyday life. With supply chains broken, lack of access to vital infrastructures of water, sanitation, energy and food and with increased vulnerability to sexual assaults, the gendered impacts of the lockdown have been largely hidden from most COVID19 policies. The second impact of this shadow pandemic has been on India’s small cities and towns where migrants returned during the lockdown. Small cities have been unequal partners in India’s urbanisation with historically poor investment in infrastructure, planning and governance; and there is now a humanitarian crisis unfolding in India’s small towns with no guarantees of food, livelihoods, healthcare or sustainable long-term futures. I will argue that a sustainable urban future lies not in the metropolitan cities, but in attending to the connected nature of marginalizations across intimate domesticities and rapidly urbanising regions.

Stefanie Hobbis (U Wageningen) & Geoffrey Hobbis (U Groningen): Shutting it Down, Tearing it Down and Hiding it: Infrastructures and Digital Techniques in the Western Pacific

With an ethnographic focus on Malaita, Solomon Islands, and West New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea, this paper explores what digital technologies as infrastructures facilitate in Island Melanesia, and how Islanders manage digital infrastructures to fulfil their needs, interests and values. We demonstrate how infrastructures, be they roads, electricity or digital technologies, are essentially entwined with social networks and that the moment supposed infrastructures hinder rather than strengthen relationships they are hidden, not used, not maintained or even torn down. Accordingly, we argue that to uncover how, when and why digital technologies become infrastructures it is crucial to pay close attention to processes of negation, when digital technologies as infrastructures are rejected by those whose connections they are meant to enable. To tease out this significance of negation, we examine, specifically, infrastructuring body techniques used by our interlocutors that push the limits of social conventions when engaging with digital technologies and, specifically, their most widespread iteration in the Pacific: smartphones.

Ingo Schulz-Schaeffer & Eric Lettkemann (TU Berlin): Transit Zones, Locales, and Locations: How Digital Annotations Affect the Accessibility of Urban Public Places

In our talk, we present an analytical concept for distinguishing manifestations of public places and discuss how locative media might reinforce or change the fabric of public space. Locative media is an umbrella term for mobile apps, providing users with digital information about their social and material surroundings. Some apps, like Ingress, are mobile games adding virtual objects to perceptible space in order to turn urban places into playgrounds. Others, such as Foursquare, are recommendation services enabling users to annotate urban places with digital photos, ratings or comments. By means of locative media, users share and create information about places and presumably contribute to the (re-)production of spatial structures. We propose to describe the public space of modern cities along two structural dimensions. On the one hand, we distinguish urban public places according to their degree of perceived accessibility. On the other hand, we distinguish urban places based on how basic or elaborate and how homogeneous or diverse the symbolic meanings attached to them are. We argue that these meanings and the associated social practices influence the perceived accessibility of public places. Based on empirical observations, we examine how locative media either reflect and reinforce the given social fabric of public space or evoke changes in the accessibility and meaning of public places.

Participants:

Ayona Datta (London):

Ayona Datta’s broad research interests are in postcolonial urbanism, smart cities, gender citizenship and regional futures. In particular, she is interested in how cities transform themselves through utopian urban visions of the future and their impacts on everyday social, material and gendered geographies. Datta uses interdisciplinary approaches from architecture, planning, feminist and urban geography, combining qualitative, digital/mapping, visual and participatory research methods to examine urbanisation and urban development as experiments in urban ‘futuring’. Currently, she is sub-panel member in the UK Research Excellence Framework 2021. She is Co-editor of Urban Geography and on editorial boards of Antipode, Dialogues in Human Geography, Digital Geography and Society and EPD:Society and Space. For her contributions to understanding of smart cities through fieldwork, Datta received the Busk Medal from the Royal Geographical Society in 2019.

Stephanie Hobbis (U Wageningen):

Stephanie Hobbis is a political anthropologist with a commitment to transdisciplinary explorations, speaking, in particular, to development, peace and conflict studies as well as food research. Her interest in these topics is reflected in ongoing projects and publications that explore everyday visibilities of global systems and their gendered dimension in Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. A focus on the everyday allows her to engage with the problematic temporalities of international development and peacebuilding. While global initiatives, such as the Sustainable Development Goals, are essentially future-oriented, her research pays attention to how the present often reflects interrupted futures, failed promises that accompanied previous development programmes. Hobbis’ focus on the everyday builds on her doctoral thesis An Ethnographic Study of the State in Rural Solomon Islands (Lau, North Malaita): A Quest for Autonomy in Global Dependencies. Her postdoctoral research expanded her analytical lens to the Bariai coast in West New Britain Province, Papua New Guinea. This project teased out the increasing role of digital technologies in mediating state-society relations, and how this mediation links to gendered experiences with political-economic development.

Geoffrey Hobbis (U Groningen):

Geoffrey Hobbis is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Media and Journalism Studies, University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre de Recherche et de Documentation sur l’Océanie, France, and lectured at the University of British Columbia, Canada.

Ingo Schulz-Schaeffer (TU Berlin):

Ingo Schulz-Schaeffer represents the discipline of sociology of technology and innovation. He has experience in research on the social shaping of technology with a special interest in the shaping of technological innovations by socio-technical scenarios and their prototypical realizations. Next to his current focus on locative media he also conducts research on the cooperation between human and robot in manufacturing among others. His latest publication Affordance, Role, and Script as Complementary Concepts of Artefact-User Interaction appeared in the Science & Technology Studies (2021).

Eric Lettkemann (TU Berlin):

Eric Lettkemann received his PhD in sociology from the TU Berlin in 2015. Since 2018, his research is part of the subproject “Locative media: inclusion and exclusion in public spaces” the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Centre 1265 “Re-Figuration of Spaces” at TU Berlin. His research interests in the sociology of innovation and technology are also reflected in his latest publications that cover – together with Ingo Schulz-Schaeffer – issues of Transit zones, locales, and locations: How locative media affect communication in public spaces (in print, 2021).

Panel 7

Spaces out of Data: Platforms and Infrastructures

11:00 am – 12:30 am CEST

Organizers: René Umlauf & Marian Burchardt (Leipzig U)

Introducing dramatic shifts in the circulation of goods, labour and money, digitization and related technological innovations challenge the ways we think about infrastructure. While classical infrastructures have been revamped through digitization processes, there is also a whole set of new technologies such as platforms and cloud-based services that are popularly captured through labels such as “infrastructure-as-a-service”, “software-as-a-service” and so on. These changes compel us to rethink notions that have been integral to social science research on infrastructure such as access and service. They introduce complex entanglements between the material (infrastructures) and the digital (platforms). But they also invite us to reconsider the ways in which infrastructures shape spatial scales, are owned and managed, their ontologies and relationships to users.

In this panel, we investigate emerging relationships between platforms, infrastructures and spatial formats, how the relationships affect our conceptual languages as well as their phenomenological instantiations. How do platforms use, supplement, challenge or undermine the core functional attributes of (material) infrastructures? How, in turn, do infrastructures resist, exacerbate or tame attempts of “platformizations” of parts of their services? Seeking answers to these questions we are interested in critical portrayals of involved actors such as state governments, bureaucracies, enterprises and the increasingly multifaceted constituency of users. Which understandings of ownership and participation are anticipated or excluded in the production and use of data? How do new social, legal, economic and ethical frictions between infrastructures and platforms result, for instance, in the formation of new (second order) platforms? We are particularly interested in conceptual contributions but also in case studies that focus on examples from the Global South.

Michel Wahome (U of Strathclyde Glasgow): Narrative Infrastructure and Fabrication in the Local Platform Economy

The platform economy generates particular sociomaterial environments and promissory landscapes of digital entrepreneurship, that are assumed to be global. Aside from the physical and cyber infrastructures that form these places, there is a narrative infrastructure (Deuten and Rip, 2000) that acts as the underlying logic and as blueprint. This narrative infrastructure is seen to represent universalisable process and best-practice, and it therefore confers legitimacy. In fact, it is a product of imaginaries, symbols and myths that are primarily EuroAmerican.

Actors in other geographies often have to fabricate narratives that align with the dominant narrative infrastructure in order to secure access to the resources and material infrastructures that will support their ventures. For example, Africa is cast as a new frontier, where one can ‘do well, while doing good’ or where digital technologies can leapfrog the need for basic services. This storytelling, and the associated legitimating practices and institutions, is fabrication. Fabrication is a practice of ‘making’, ‘making do with’ and also ‘making up’. Nairobi’s Silicon Savannah acts as a case study.

Eric Monteiro (Norwegian U of Science & Technology): Infrastructures and the Digital

The theoretical lens of infrastructure has been used across a wide set of domains and contexts. I focus on one particular expression viz digital infrastructures, increasingly emerging through processes of ‘platformization’.

What, if any, is new with recent manifestations of digitalization and what role, if any, do platforms/ does infrastructure play? To get at this, digitalization is understood as attempted efforts of quantification of the qualitative. I draw on ongoing digital transformation of knowing practices in an industrial sector (offshore oil and gas in Norway) as illustration.

Despite obvious similarities with the situation before the term digitalization was popularized, three interestingly different aspects are increasing tendencies of: (i) the objects of knowing are datafied (i.e., algorithmic phenomenon), (ii) the modes of knowing data-driven and (iii) the machineries of knowing infrastructural. The characteristics of platformization, then, is the concerted result of all three of these tendencies.

Nick Couldry (LSE London): The Colonial Expansion of Space in Datafied Societies

We have known for at least half a century that humans socially construct reality (Berger and Luckmann), but we now must analyse Big Tech business’ role, through platforms ‘ecologies’, in literally building new spaces for social interaction, movement and governance. The surveillance spaces of contemporary capitalism have limitless depth and directionality, achieved by embedding of powerful computers into physical space, as we move our devices around and as other devices track us moving. Previous theorizations understood this as the expansion of labour. A better framework, this paper suggests, is that of colonialism: the emergence of a new stage of colonialism, data colonialism (Couldry and Mejias 2019), that uses law, software engineering and habit, to build new spaces for social interaction from which economic value can be seamlessly extracted in the form of actual or anticipated data. Data colonialism builds on, but adds a distinctive and innovative layer to, existing spaces of neo-colonial power and inequality.

Participants:

Michel Wahome (U of Strathclyde Glasgow):

Michel Wahome is a Research Fellow at the One Ocean Hub located within the Strathclyde Law School. She has a background in postcolonial science and technology studies and critical social science. Her research interest is inclusive, ethical innovation and knowledge production. At the One Ocean Hub, she is researching processes and institutional environments that aim to facilitate applied, collaborative research. This research investigates academic research for development (R4D) as a means to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and tackle development challenges. Prior to joining the One Ocean Hub, Michel was a researcher on the Geonet project at the Oxford Internet Institute.

Eric Monteiro (Norwegian U of Science & Technology):

Eric Monteiro is professor of information systems at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and adjunct professor at the University of Oslo. His research interest focuses on the transformation of work practices accompanying digitalization efforts in organizations. This involves identifying the organizational and technical conditions for realizing the potential of digitalization in practice. He has been project leader for a portfolio of research projects into digitalization of oil and gas in close collaboration with industry. He is part of the management group on BRU21, a large-scale, fully industry-funded national initiative on digitalization and automation in oil and gas.

Nick Couldry (LSE London):

Nick Couldry is a sociologist of media and culture. He is Professor of Media Communications and Social Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and in since 2017 also a Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. He is the author or editor of fifteen books including The Mediated Construction of Reality (with Andreas Hepp, Polity, 2016), Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice (Polity 2012) and Why Voice Matters (Sage 2010). His latest books are The Costs of Connection: How Data is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating Life for Capitalism (with Ulises Mejias: Stanford UP, 2019), Media: Why It Matters (Polity: 2019) and Media, Voice, Space and Power: Essays of Refraction (Routledge 2021).