The Promise of Infrastructure

<div>From U.S.-Mexico border walls to Flint's poisoned pipes there is a new urgency to the politics of infrastructure. Roads electricity lines water pipes and oil installations promise to distribute the resources necessary for everyday life. Yet an attention to their ongoing processes also reveals how infrastructures are made with fragile and often violent relations among people materials and institutions. While infrastructures promise modernity and development their breakdowns and absences reveal the underbelly of progress liberal equality and economic growth. This tension between aspiration and failure makes infrastructure a productive location for social theory. Contributing to the everyday lives of infrastructure across four continents some of the leading anthropologists of infrastructure demonstrate in <i>The Promise of Infrastructure</i> how these more-than-human assemblages made over more-than-human lifetimes offer new opportunities to theorize time politics and promise in the contemporary moment.<br><br>A School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar<br><br>Contributors. Nikhil Anand Hannah Appel Geoffrey C. Bowker Dominic Boyer Akhil Gupta Penny Harvey Brian Larkin Christina Schwenkel Antina von Schnitzler</div>