Technology & State

Infrastructures, Spaces and the State

Infrastructures are important meeting points of states and citizens, and it is through infrastructural provision and access to infrastructural goods that otherwise abstract notions of citizenship become concrete and materially tangible. Therefore, infrastructures have been central to the twin promises of modernity of material flourishing and increased equality. At the same time, infrastructures shape spaces: they create, underwrite or transform territories of the nation, networks of provision, and lines of connectivity and disconnection. Considering such lines of connectivity and disconnecting with a view to current (and sometimes dramatic) dynamics of social and technological changes, we might also ask how newly created spaces transform or make use of existing infrastructures in ways not anticipated before. How do neoliberal modes of government reshuffle the working of infrastructures and technology? How is infrastructural citizenship unmade and remade? How do processes of digitization and other modes of technological change recast relationships between people and the state? And how do people circumvent, manipulate or resist infrastructures and the control/power relationships they represent? In this course, students deepen their understanding of the relationship between technology, infrastructures, and modalities of space-making and the role of state and non-state actors in (re-)configuring those relationships. Situated at the interface of the anthropology of infrastructure, science and technology studies and the sociology of space, the course enables students to assess how technological and spatial dimensions underwrite people’s practices in multiple social fields and vice versa.

Where: Leipzig (venue tba)
When: Wednesday, 3 June, to Thursday, 4 June 2025