Upside Down: Unsettling the Verticality of Infrastructures

Abstracts

A Post-Coalonial Figure-Ground Reversal: Making Mine Water Heat Infrastructure in County Durham

Chima Michael Anyadike-Danes, Durham University

In this presentation I explore what happens when partners in a longstanding symbolic dyad reverse their roles as a new socio-technical systems emerges. During the industrial revolution underground coalmining became central to the economy of County Durham – a rural area in England’s North East. While the Victorian-era hierarchy frequently classified them as sub-human and subjected them to ‘the Bond’ – a system of worker management that made them akin to serfs – working-class mining communities succeeded in wielding some power due the verticality of the infrastructure and the labour process. They were able to introduce innovative social reforms that created a more horizontal society. As the miners worked to remove coal from the depths, they had to contend with water which entered the gaps created by their labour. This water was, to borrow from Mary Douglas, dirt i.e., ‘matter out of place’. 

However, during Margaret Thatcher’s ministries industrial policy was to de-emphasise domestic coal production. Eventually County Durham came to be regarded as in need of regeneration, so it could be ‘levelled up’. Meanwhile the area’s local government sought to decarbonise. Coal was now ‘out of place’ while water in the mine warmed through geothermal gradient was regarded as clean because of its ability to conduct heat and thus warm homes. But what theories of sociality will shape this new vertical infrastructure? Will it be implemented in such a manner as to further solidify a vertically differentiated society or alternatively will it provide the means for the restoration of horizontal communalism?

Unearthing the Underground: Vertical Timescales of Groundwater

Susann Baez Ullberg, Uppsala University

In view of reduced supply of fresh water worldwide, groundwater is increasingly being extracted. Aquifers constitute geohydrosocial infrastructures aimed a sustaining agricultural and industrial demands. This has led to aquifer depletion in some regions. At the same time, groundwater is also being contaminated due to industrial and agricultural pollution. Scarcity and pollution are prompting water users to drill deeper in search for cleaner ‘ancient’ groundwater that is thousands (or even millions) years old and located deep into the ground. The temporality of groundwater is thus currently gaining importance, since time, or age, affects the properties of water, hence its’ quality, which in turn shapes water management practices and policies. This paper explores the temporalities of groundwater as vertical timescales to understand how they are rendered knowledgeable.

The Impact of Geopolitics and Local Verticality on Taiwan's Underground Water Crisis (1950s-1970s)

Chun-Yi Ho, Graduate Institute of National Development, National Taiwan Univeristy

This article discusses how Taiwan's "underground water crisis" was influenced by global geopolitics and local verticality, specifically in the context of the Eastern Asia Cold War. The article examines how the Kuomintang (KMT) government and international aid agencies from the "free world" supported the KMT government in developing groundwater development projects in Taiwan. With the assistance of international agency experts, KMT technocrats designed a groundwater regulation regime to prevent over-exploitation. However, the KMT government's incomplete understanding of the underground world impeded their ability to regulate groundwater effectively. Their ontologies about the underground were sufficient for developing groundwater, but not for regulation. Furthermore, the article highlights that the international aid agencies' focus on cost-benefit evaluations limited financial support for the KMT government's groundwater department, further exacerbating the groundwater regulation issues. The article examines how the interactions between local and global actors involved in managing groundwater resources impacted the production of verticality through the pursuit of legibility in the underground world, taking into account the varying needs and scales of different actors.

Queering Deep Space Frontiers Through Performance

Bibiana Med, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Outer space is the frontier of the 21st century. Frontiers like deep space have important visual components in which technology and media historically have played crucial roles in reinforcing colonial narratives. State and private actors are in a new race to stake ‘land’ that is narrated as a productive resource, and formal territorial claims by non-/state actors provide possibilities for white settler futurity. The research questions behind this work critique the motives of actors in Space through a more equitable lens. 

This research-creation project Queer Space Network (QSN) uses queer theory as a political inquiry tool, framing ‘queer’ as an unstable, boundary-crossing concept with a possibility of plurality. QSN is a collaborative media and performance Space laboratory that uses technology to create media investigations through queer drag performance and video production, producing a place of resistance that generates a queer counter-public in Space: a new inclusive futurity that is both horizontal and plural.  

The project works with the theories of Achille Mbembe’s replacing the verticality of Western power systems with ‘spheres of horizontality’, José Esteban Muñoz act of imagining alternate futures to create a ‘queer horizon’ of possibility and future collectivity, and Sara Ahmed’s work on the normative vertical axis that can counter in moving in space as a ‘field of action’. QSN embodies rejections to linear, axial, continuous time and space and through performance and analog technologies, considers the body in Space in non-vertical orientations to the ground to look for new possibilities.

Environments on/off Earth: Oligoptic-satellitarian landscapes in northern Sweden

Chakad Ojani, Uppsala University

This paper focuses on a series of environmental imaginaries enacted through infrastructural engagements with outer space in Sweden. Space actors often highlight the centrality of satellite vision from orbit for contemporary understandings of planetary environments. At the same time, these infrastructures reshape Earth orbit itself by turning it into an environmental realm with its own form of waste. In Sweden, space actors are expressing concerns about the so-called Kessler syndrome, an event whereby the exponential growth of space debris would altogether foreclose the possibility of satellite vision. However, space infrastructures in Sweden also reconfigure environments on Earth by tapping into and reproducing deep-seated constructions of the Circumpolar North as an empty wilderness. In order for satellite launches to successfully happen from the country’s spaceport outside the subarctic city of Kiruna, the surrounding landscape needs to be maintained as an impact area, with the consequence that Sámi land practices are ignored and pushed to the sidelines. By turning to Sámi reindeer herders' own uses of satellite data, I highlight an alternative, non-panoticonic satellitarian environment. Rather than trying to see everything from nowhere, instrumentalisations of satellite technology for reindeer herding are oligoptic: they bring into view a limited set of more-than-human relations so as to challenge dominant framings of the landscape. Against this backdrop, I suggest that it is from the very multiplicity of environments, engendered through intensifying sociotechnical engagements with outer space, that we might be able to elicit more attentive modes of relating to our more-than-human surrounds.

Icy Infrastructures and Colonial Legacies: Tracing the Cryo-History of Transatlantic Telecommunication Infrastructure in the Arctic

Mette Simonsen Abildgaard, Aalborg University

Drawing on Actor-Network Theory and postcolonial studies, this paper follows the case of the discarded 160-year-old plans for “The Northern Route” - a transatlantic telegraph that would have placed Greenland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands at the center of transatlantic communication in the 19th century. I trace how notions of the Arctic Sublime, a dependency on “credible ice witnesses,” local ice knowledges and the “politics of comparison” influenced the eventual abandonment of the route, where Arctic territories were (dis)regarded and considered as mere “substrate” for infrastructure. I argue that this cryo-history of Arctic telecommunication infrastructures highlights how colonial logics about who to connect, and where, still influence infrastructural development in the region today.

Inhabiting a Moving Ground: Generative Surface-Deep Subsurface Relations and Thinking With Indeterminacy in Turkey's Büyük Menderes, Denizli and Gediz Grabens

Asli Uludag, Goldsmiths, University of London

The movement in and of the ground introduces a multitude of potentials to the surface environments in the Buyuk Menderes, Denizli and Gediz Grabens in the Aegean Region of Turkey. Since the 1960s, one potential among them—geothermal energy potential—has been materialized through mapping, remote sensing, speculating, drilling and, finally, the production of not only geothermally produced electricity but also of environmental violence. Mapping the aquifer-borehole-geothermal energy plant complex and challenging the surface/subsurface separation is certainly productive in investigating and problematizing the vertically expanding state-corporate mechanisms of extraction. However, this vertical but nonetheless cartographic and flat vision must be followed by shifts in perspective to take us back to our situated position on the surface, looking down; then to the subsurface, looking up; then elsewhere, under and over, to offer alternative modes of engaging with the multidimensionality of environmental politics and the indeterminacy of inhabiting a moving ground. This paper follows the manifestations of the deep subsurface on the surface in the Buyuk Menderes, Denizli and Gediz Grabens, caused both by the environmental violence and the deep subsurface making itself present on the surface. As the colour yellow, smell of rotten eggs, cracking, bubbling and vapour lead me from geothermal energy production to the other ancient and contemporary local practices that engage with the deep subsurface, pipelines, boreholes, fault lines and the lines of the vertical and the horizontal axes twist and arc into the knotted worlds shaped by the geo-politics of inhabiting a moving ground.

The outside within: Resituating 'the environment' in cleaning households, wastewater, rivers, and air

Sam van der Lugt, University of Amsterdam

When soap cleans in households, it pollutes water. When wastewater treatment cleans water, it pollutes the air. This paper takes such tensions as the starting point to determine how multiple registers of knowing and valuing across scales relate to one another in soap production, household cleaning, wastewater treatment, and ecotoxicology research. Recent publications in STS of waste and valuation call for studying multiple related practices and how these impact ‘the environment.’ They set up ‘the environment’ as a shared ‘context’ or ‘outside’ within which practices occur. However, this article’s data from fieldwork and interviews on soap-related practices show that ‘the environment’ is enacted differently depending on whether ‘soap’ takes the form of ‘ingredients,’ ‘bars and bottles,’ ‘wastewater,’ or ‘toxicants.’ These articulate ‘the environment’ as a collection of resources, a community of similar organisms, a balance of organisms, and (bodily) reservoirs for discard, respectively. Different ‘environments’ are formed depending on the available modes of knowing and valuing granted by material specificities. Based on these findings, the paper argues that when STS of ecological issues refrains from establishing ‘the environment’ as a shared context, it can better uncover which ‘environments’ are situated within different practices. More broadly, this contributes to a shift from studying different parallel realities in practice to studying how different practices contain each other’s reality in their own image. Such a shift enables us to better attune to tensions between related practices and uncover what material specificities hinder mediation when aiming to achieve multiple environmental goods.