Infrastructures of Violence

Infrastructures of Violence

Rebecca M. Brown, Professor and Chair, History of Art, Johns Hopkins University; Swati Chattopadhyay, Professor, History of Art and Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara; and Avishek Ray, Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology Silchar, in conversation with Assistant Professor Ateya Khorakiwala.

This conversation aimed to consider the histories of the built environment in the wake of their failures during this past year through the pandemic. If we locate the history of infrastructure in the techno-scientific rationalities of colonial extractivisms and post-colonial developmentalism, then what have been the vectors of power that are crystalized in the built environment that have determined the betrayal of laboring bodies? How has a politics of ever expanding extractivism located itself on the bodies of working people? Is infrastructure a structure of power or a technique of violence?