[STS-Africa] CfP Infrastructures in comparison, funded workshop, Singapore 30.9.-2.10.2026

Fri Mar 27 15:27:37 SAST 2026

Consider joining us for ShapingAsia's final conference, co-organized by Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle/Saale), University Heidelberg and National University of Singapore!

Call for Papers - Conference 'Infrastructures, in comparison: Thinking across cases and contexts' (30.9.-2.10.2026, ARI/NUS Singapore)

Organizers: Ursula Rao (MPI Halle), Arne Harms (MPI Halle), Anja Senz (U Heidelberg), Chang Jiat Hwee (NUS)
Date: 30.9.-2.10.2026
Venue: ARI/NUS Singapore
More infos on ShapingAsia: http://shapingasia.net/

Keynotes by Mikkel Bunkenborg (Kopenhagen) and Michael Schnegg (Hamburg)

Overview
Asia is seeing the implementation of infrastructural forms that appear strikingly similar across sites. Roads or port facilities answer to standardized forms of mobility, enabling the global reach of goods or people through homogenic forms. The scaling up of digital surveillance in India or China relies on similar technologies, arguably used for partly different ends. While infrastructural spaces - such as Special Economy Zones or plantations - popping up all over Asia showcase family resemblances, regardless where they are placed.  As dis/similar forms, these and other infrastructures not only appear to shape local or national politics, they also play a critical role in scaffolding contemporary Asia as a whole, likely shaping its emergent futures. Against this background, this conference explores the use of comparison for grappling with infrastructures. Based on ethnographic research on infrastructures spread across Asia, we aim at exploring the use of comparison for analyzing actual making of infrastructures, for theorizing the development of infrastructural forms and for rethinking Asia.

Across Asia, infrastructures are the subject of intense debate and critique. Taking issue with spectacular infrastructure development initiatives, social scientists have begun questioning how Asia gets remade in the process (Hirsh and Mostowlansky 2022). A burgeoning social science scholarship explores how people demand connection in some places and fear displacement by construction activities in others (e.g. Gardner 2012); how contemporary infrastructure projects unleash processes of standardizing of what may travel and what not (Carse and Lewis 2016); how digitally-enabled infrastructures allow for unprecedented surveillance (Rao and Nair 2019); or how un/intended consequences of infrastructure development inform political debate on all levels, from potential and actual users over activists to designers, financiers and politicians (see e.g. Harms and Ley 2026). Across cases, infrastructures appear "conceptually unruly" (Larkin 2013, 329): the division between infrastructures and technologies, or between engineering and governance, remains porous and subject to concrete manifestations ambiguous (Anand et al. 2018; Carse 2016; Hetherington 2019).

Taking issue with the pervasiveness of infrastructural development, on the one hand, and the relative similarity of infrastructural forms, on the other, this conference explores infrastructures by way of comparison between concrete manifestations within and across localities and socio-ecological contexts. Doing so will generate new perspectives on ubiquitous governance interventions, while allowing to rethink the means and ends of engaging in comparison to come to terms with the contemporary. How are globally circulating forms implemented into divergent contexts and for partly differing ends? What role do situated acts of constructing, maintaining, resisting or retrofitting play for what infrastructures become? What do we learn about Asian futures while thinking through the dissemination of infrastructural forms across the region? How do we think them together? And what role might comparison play to grapple with transnational entanglements?
Grounded in fieldwork-based research on infrastructures spread across Asia, we aim at exploring the use of comparison for analyzing actual making of infrastructures, for theorizing the development of infrastructural forms and for rethinking Asia.

  1.  Social science scholarship has provided vital accounts of the actual implementation of infrastructures, advancing inquiries into the translation of technologies into specific contexts by way of construction, maintenance or repair (Elinoff 2017; Björkman 2015). This conference aims at shedding new light on the actual making of infrastructures by discussing how specific infrastructures fare in different contexts. What kinds of negotiations or improvisations do we see across localized efforts of implementing, say, border infrastructures? To what degree is the way infrastructures work in given localities shaped by national or supranational 'sociotechnological imaginaries' (Jasanoff and Kim 2013)? How does the implementation of complex and porous infrastructures impact what Asia is becoming as differently situated actors navigate economic restructuring and ecological crises? What does it do to infrastructural forms - from SEZ over coastal protection to, say, air-conditioning - as they travel across landscapes or nation states and in doing so animate scaled worlding practices?
  2.  Zooming in on how infrastructures fare as they hit the ground also allows vistas into the ongoing development of new infrastructural forms. Struggling to make connections and connectivities work across field sites, people not only translate design principles into local conditions. They also rework those very design principles, rendering infrastructural development sites of 'friction' through which the global emerges and from where globally circulating forms are continuously redone (Tsing 2005). What do we learn about the creation of newness as we think across sites of implementation of dis/similar infrastructures? How does redundancy or breakdown shape the development of infrastructures over time? What does ethnographic attention to the ways by which concrete infrastructures spread across sites, regions or nations allow us to say about visions of incremental improvement and ruination, about leapfrogging and recursive experiences of failing and learning?
  3.  Finally, exploring infrastructures spread across Asia allows unique vantage points for rethinking Asia. Building on granular accounts of the politics and poetics of infrastructures in concrete contexts, we discuss how infrastructures - as networked iterations - reshape interconnection in and imaginaries of Asia. In doing so, we build on critical scholarship on inter-referencing that establishes how thinking with and through multiple reference points (rather than simple East-West binaries) provides venues for decolonizing Asian studies and for theorizing urban development across Asia (Bunnell 2015; Chen 2010; Ong 2011). We explore how infrastructures are recursively shaped by intra-Asian and global processes of "citation, allusion, aspiration, comparison, and competition" (Ong 2011, 17), and how their implementation creates and recreates experiences of 'Asia' within global conduits. What kind of visions of Asia do particular infrastructures entail? How do infrastructural interventions contribute to bring about experiences that might or might not count as Asian? To what extent do infrastructures scaffold Asia's futures, and refract it differently in scattered locations and contexts?

Participation
The three-day conference will be structured around keynotes, panels and experimental engagements with Singapore's urban environment.
We invite proposals for empirically grounded presentations exploring infrastructures across Asia (duration 20 minutes). This could involve comparing across field sites situated within areas or nations, as well as across the region. We welcome submissions from researchers at all career stages and disciplinary backgrounds, exploring the use of comparison for analyzing the actual making of infrastructures, for theorizing the development of infrastructural forms and for rethinking Asia.  We are particularly interested in receiving proposals from scholars based in Asia.
There is no workshop fee. Participants from Asia will received free accommodation and will be reimbursed for their travel costs to and from Singapore up to Euro 1500.
Paper proposal need to include

  *   Title and abstract of the paper (300 words)
  *   Short bio (200 words)
  *   Short statement on whether travel funding is required and for travel from what destination
Please submit your proposal by April 30st 2026 to harms at eth.mpg.de<mailto:harms at eth.mpg.de>. The committee will select papers by early May.

References

Anand, Nikhil, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel, eds. 2018. The Promise of Infrastructure. Duke University Press.

Björkman, Lisa. 2015. Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastructures of Millennial Mumbai. Duke University Press.

Bunnell, Tim. 2015. "Antecedent Cities and Inter-Referencing Effects: Learning from and Extending beyond Critiques of Neoliberalisation." Urban Studies 52 (11): 1983-2000.

Carse, Ashley. 2016. "Keyword: Infrastructure: How a Humble French Engineering Term Shaped the Modern World." In Infrastructures and Social Complexity. Routledge.

Carse, Ashley, and Joshua A. Lewis. 2016. "Toward a Political Ecology of Infrastructure Standards: Or, How to Think about Ships, Waterways, Sediment, and Communities Together." Environment and Planning A 49 (1): 9-28. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X16663015.

Chen, Kuan-Hsing. 2010. Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. Duke University Press.

Elinoff, Eli. 2017. "Concrete and Corruption: Materialising Power and Politics in the Thai Capital." City 21 (5): 587-96.

Gardner, Katy. 2012. Discordant Development: Global Capitalism and the Struggle for Connection in Bangladesh. Pluto Press.

Harms, Arne, and Lukas Ley, eds. 2026. Coastal Futures: Life Between and at the Edges of the Sea. University of Toronto Press.

Hetherington, Kregg, ed. 2019. Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene. Duke University Press.

Hirsh, Max, and Till Mostowlansky. 2022. Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia. University of Hawaii Press.

Jasanoff, Sheila, and Sang-Hyun Kim. 2013. "Sociotechnical Imaginaries and National Energy Policies." Science as Culture 22 (2): 189-96.

Larkin, Brian. 2013. "The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure." Annual Review of Anthropology 42: 327-43.

Ong, Aihwa. 2011. "Introduction: Worlding Cities, or the Art of Being Global." In Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, edited by Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong. Wiley Online Library.

Rao, Ursula, and Vijayanka Nair. 2019. Aadhaar: Governing with Biometrics. In South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, vol. 42. no. 3. Taylor & Francis.

Tsing, Anna L. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton University Press.

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Dr. Arne Harms
Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany
https://www.eth.mpg.de/harms

Author of 'Enduring Erosions: Environmental Displacement and Relocation on India's Sinking Coasts,' University of Hawai'i Press 2024 https://manifold.uhpress.hawaii.edu/projects/enduring-erosions (OPEN ACCESS)

Editor of Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale

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