Experimental Infrastructures: Material Insufficiency, Scale, and the Question of (Im)possibility - I

Abstract

When faced with obdurate systems, social movements often create experimental infrastructures that suggest radical new arrangements of resources, knowledges, and power. While these systems are often materially insufficient to immediately address the full scale of the problems that inspired them, they have the potential to reorganize the conditions that limit what people imagine as possible. What is the role of small-scale systems in pushing large-scale change? How do designers, developers, and maintainers of small-scale experimental infrastructures imagine the work of scaling up, building out, or strengthening these systems? How do they challenge the limits of time, materiality, and imagination? And how do small-scale infrastructural innovations challenge and reproduce relations of power?

In this open panel, we invite scholars and organizers who are working with movement-built infrastructures in a wide array of arenas. We are using “movement” in a broad sense to include any set of people that is working to crease social change.

Fundamentally, we are seeking to better understand how projects with incredible potential could scale in ways that change the conditions of possibility in the direction of a wildly different world. By pulling together these examples, we aim to help each other imagine alternative futures beyond what we can currently conceptualize, and develop strategies for getting from here to there.

Chairs

• Brandon Costelloe-Kuehn, RPI

• Guy Schaffer, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Individual Presentations

• Decomposing Utopia: Experimental Infrastructures for Decay in the NYC Compost Project - Guy Schaffer, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

• Feminist Hackers to Science Labs: Emergent Possibilities for Feminist Movements in Technoscience for Engineering Education - Ellen K Foster, Purdue University

• From Infrastructure to Exostructure: Emergence and Transience in the Exploitation of Public Data - Anissa Tanweer, University of Washington

• Greenish-Grey: Navigating Professional Expertise in the Sustainable City - Amanda K Phillips de Lucas, Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies

• Imaginaries of the Infrastructure for a More Just Data Economy - Tuukka Lehtiniemi, University of Helsinki

Session Organizers

• Brandon Costelloe-Kuehn, RPI

• Guy Schaffer, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute