History and Infrastructure

Welcome

The goal of this workshop on History and Infrastructure is to begin an exploration of what historians can contribute to the marked growth of writing on "infrastructure" across the humanities and social sciences over the last decade.

Across these works, infrastructure enjoys a wide range of definitions, including deployment as a metaphor. As a result, even as its usage has amplified, its stability as a concept has weakened. In this project, we aim to think through the various historical processes that shape infrastructure across its life cycle—creation, maintenance, repair, obsolescence, and destruction. We are particularly interested in the histories of material, physical infrastructures, and the ways these histories are embedded in or intersect with economy and finance, environment, the law, and security.

Arunabh Ghosh (Harvard) and Aditya Balasubramanian (Australian National University)
Conveners