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Desire and Denial: On Constructing and Contesting Infrastructures
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Desire and Denial: On Constructing and Contesting Infrastructures
Sale price
£22.50
Regular price
£30.00
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Ambivalent Infrastructures
Infrastructures are not just technical systems but cultural and political orders that stabilize and transform societal processes. Following Brian Larkin’s study “The Politics
and Poetics of Infrastructure”, the writings collected in Desire and Denial conceive of
infrastructures as material manifestations of symbolic and economic projects and
efforts to build political power. They embody collective desires—for mobility, safety,
control, or modernization, among other things—that not only structure planning
processes, but also constitute normative ideas about the future.
Meanwhile, infrastructures operate on the basis of denial: by systemically conceal-
ing, say, environmental devastation, social inequality, political exclusion, and colonial
continuities. As Donna Haraway already underscored in the late 1980s, techno-scientific orders are premised on stories of objectivity and innocence—narrative patterns
that also inform the planning and legitimation of infrastructures and the visions of the
future they imply.
The contributions explore this complex set of tensions, reading infrastructures as not
just part of the built environment, but also politically contested, culturally appropriated, and symbolically fraught scenes of social conflict.
- ISBN-13
- 9783954768165
- Publisher
- DISTANZ Verlag
- Imprint
- DISTANZ Verlag
- Publication date
- 2 January 2026
- Format
- Paperback
- Pages
- 144
- Dimensions
- 260 x 210 mm
- Language
- English
