[Air-L] CfP: Infrastructure grad conference at UC—Irvine (3/8—3/9 2024)

[Alexander Rudenshiold]

Hi all!

Excited to share (and sorry for any cross-posting) that next March 8th and 9th here at UC—Irvine we will be hosting an interdisciplinary graduate student conference (post-docs are also welcome) themed around critical approaches to infrastructure studies. If you are a grad student in Southern California, I’d strongly encourage you to apply! If you’re advising a grad student in the area, please pass this CfP along! 

We’re very excited to have Dr. Lisa Parks as a keynote representing contemporary approaches to infrastructure. This will be a great opportunity for students to connect with faculty and peers conducting like-minded work with a variety of different theoretical and methodological approaches. You will find that the potential topics are wide-ranging so as to encourage all kinds of submissions. 

Thank you in advance for sharing! 
— Alex

> In the Burrow: Critical Approaches to Infrastructure Studies
> Dates: March 8th & 9th 2024
> Place: University of California—Irvine
> Keynotes: Dr. Lisa Parks (UCSB) & Dr. John Hopkins (NYU)
> 
> This work is a rhizome, a burrow...We will enter, then, by any point whatsoever; none matters more than another, and no entrance is more privileged even if it seems an impasse, a tight passage, a siphon.
> — Deleuze & Guattari, Toward a Minor Literature
> 
> This conference seeks to bring together early career scholars (graduate students and postdoctoral scholars are particularly encouraged) to encounter one another’s infrastructural interests and perspectives. Papers which take an infrastructural approach to the ancient and premodern technologies are encouraged alongside those on modern and contemporary material; authors who take up infrastructure as object, method, both, or otherwise in their work on archaeology or media archeology, anthropology, informatics, literary studies, or art history, as well as other fields in the humanities and social sciences are all encouraged to participate.
> 
> Burrowing describes a laborious process of moving through a dense medium — of confronting a mundane materiality with one’s own bodily experience. The burrow maps the void left by an organism through time within a subterranean, subaltern, or otherwise subliminal environment. Burrowing requires the adoption of an infrastructural disposition towards the world.
> 
> From a desertified minor literature to the phatic labor of human speech acts to water conduits and digital media, the study of infrastructure has drawn upon, brought together, and absorbed a wide variety of discourses across the humanities and social sciences. Infrastructure encourages perspectives ‘from below,’ it excavates subsumed and alternative landscapes; it sublimates parallel biological and material worlds, giving breath to their underlying possibilities for life. As pipes, aqueducts, roads, fiber optic cables, maintenance labor, and catacombs — as minor literatures, artifacts, and temporalities — infrastructures offer us conceptual burrows with which to overhaul and undermine scholarly perspectives and methods which are often rooted in the nodes and networks articulated from positions of power and historical privilege.
> 
> Papers might address topics ranging from (but not limited to):
> Ancient economies and networks
> Moments of deinvisibilization and rupture
> Videogames: structures, simulations, simulacra
> Visual, cultural representations of infrastructure
> Premodern gift exchange
> The living body as landscape
> People as infrastructure: beyond flat ontology
> Word of mouth, gossip, and hubbub
> Environmental time in the urban landscape
> Circulation and flow (or backflow)
> Sublimated material relations
> Affect and infrastructures of feeling
> Wires, clouds, digital metaphors
> Practices of minor mapping
> Writing from below: hidden, subsumed, subliminal
> Making and growing living infrastructures
> Catacombs, cults, cryptids, concatenations
> Send 300-500 word abstracts to uciinfrastructure2024 at gmail.com by 11/15/2023. Please direct any questions to the above email as well. We hope to return decisions by 12/1/2023. Written papers (20 minute presentations) will be due a week prior to the conference. Panels will be assembled by theme rather than by discipline, and will be chaired by UCI faculty respondents who will facilitate discussion across talks within a panel. Organizers are in talks with the editors of AfterImage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism to construct a special issue based on the presentations made at this conference.



>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Alexander  <https://twitter.com/rudenshiold>@ <https://twitter.com/rudenshiold>Rudenshiold <https://twitter.com/rudenshiold>
Film & Media Ph.D. student
	+ UAW 2865 dept. steward 
	+ CATS Lab @ UC – Irvine
Media, Culture, & Tech M.A. @ U.Va.
rudenshiold.com <https://rudenshiold.com/> // Infant Island <https://infantisland.bandcamp.com/> // Mattachine <https://mattachine.bandcamp.com/>