1. Abysmal infrastructures. Energy communities in the maintenance, repairing, improvement, or abandonment
Gloria Baigorrotegui, Instituto de Estudios Avanzados - Usach; Cecilia Ibarra, Universidad de Chile; Oscar Zapata, University of Saskatchewan; Guillermo Guajardo Soto, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês, Spanish/Español/Espanhol, Portuguese/Portugués
According to the call of this 4S-Esocite “Reunion, Recuperation and Reconfiguration,” we invite thinking, linking, and problematizing ideas, works and research about communities, collectives’ entanglements imbricated, implicated in practices of repairing, maintenances, valuation, or abandonment of infrastructures.
The immense abysses, the great imposing depths, such as the seas, the gullies, the chasms, or the novel openings caused by the small apparent ins and outs or silent movements Barad (2017), locate the infrastructures beyond order and progress and beyond the fragility and vulnerability.
Although the abysses are uncomfortable and can be related to evil and perdition, a normative look less focused on its proper functioning makes it possible to access the agency of constant infiltrations and systematic negotiations (Hencke, 2020, 2021) and persistent forgetfulness more clearly. This is especially the case of countries that acquire or host projects and constructions conceived somewhere else (Zunino, Gruschetsky and Piglia, 2021). Moreover, the justification for abandonment is usually presented as a “lack of maintenance and repair.”
Therefore, we invite STS works on energy, transport infrastructures, sanitary, urban, agri-food networks to do-undo, break-darn, discard-reuse, our knowledge-doings regarding communal, infrastructural policies, as new ways of learning from a polyphony of voices and from those / to places where most of the time are in silence. These interstices reveal new poetics and semiotic-material and affective tasks concerning the infrastructural abysses or abysmal infrastructures.
