Readings for discussion

• Spice, Anne. 2018. Fighting invasive infrastructures: Indigenous relations against pipelines. Environment and Society 9: 40-56.
• Havrelock, Rachel. 2017. The borders beneath: On pipelines and resource sovereignty. South Atlantic Quarterly 116(2): 408-416.
• LaDuke, Winona and Cowen, Deborah. 2020. Beyond Wiindigo infrastructure. South Atlantic Quarterly 119(2): 243-268.

Further reading

• Stuart Schrader. 2019. To protect and serve themselves: Police in US politics since the 1960s. Public Culture 31(3): 601-623.
• D’Angelo, Chris. 2021. For Republicans, pipes are infrastructure only if they carry oil. Huffpost. 5 April.
• Sojoyner, Damien. 2017. Another life is possible: Black fugivity and enclosed places. Cultural Anthropology 32(4): 514-536.

Media

• Fox, Josh, Spione, James and Dewey, Myron. 2017. Awake.

Readings for discussion

• Shapiro, Nicholas. 2015. Attuning to the chemosphere: Domestic formaldehyde, bodily reasoning, and the chemical sublime.­ Cultural Anthropology 30(3): 368-393.
• Kaplan, Caren and Miller, Andrea. 2019. Drones as “atmospheric policing”: From US border enforcement to the LAPD. Public Culture 31(3): 419-445.
• Ghertner, D. Asher. 2020. Airpocalypse: Distributions of life amidst Delhi’s polluted airs. Public Culture 32(1): 133-162.

Further reading

• Choy, Timothy and Zee, Jerry. 2015. Condition–suspension. Cultural Anthropology 30(2): 210-223.
• Ahmann, Chloe and Kenner, Alison. 2020. Breathing late industrialism. Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 6.

Media

• People are still living in FEMA’s toxic trailers. 2015. Grist.

Readings for discussion

• Fennell, Catherine and Tucker, Daniel. 2015. Displacemaking. The Avery Review (10): 1-7.
• Zamfirescu, Irina and Chelcea, Liviu. 2020. Evictions as infrastructural events. Urban Geography. September: 1-22.
• Bryant, Rebecca. 2021. Sovereignty in drag: On fakes, foreclosure, and unbecoming states. Cultural Anthropology 36(1).

Further reading

• Hinkson, Melinda. 2017. Precarious placemaking. Annual Review of Anthropology 46: 49-64.
• Sullivan, Esther. 2017. Displaced in place: Manufactured housing, mass eviction, and the paradox of state intervention. American Sociological Review 82(2): 243-269.
• Dozier, Deshonay. 2019. Contested development: Homeless property, police reform, and resistance in Skid Row, LA. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 41(3): 179-194.

Media

• Geographies of Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore. 2020. Directed by Kenton Card. Antipode Foundation.

This reading program interrogates the idea of infrastructural zones. These are both the discrete areas in which infrastructures are built and operate and the relations between networks of places drawn together by infrastructural exchange. Zoning is a constitutive process, enabled through various forms of material and symbolic action: planning, mapping, construction, policing, and so on. In turn, the production of infrastructural zones promotes forms of subjectification and associated attunements, affects, and experiences. These sessions continue the Infrastructural Inequalities readings group (2018–), extending the discussion of topics such as architecture, water, waste, words, wires, data and prediction, the technofix, and extraction. The geographic metaphor of zones draws attention to the spatial elements of infrastructure, considered at multiple scales, while remaining aware of the temporal impacts of infrastructural exchange, expansion, ruin, and delay.

Contact—liam.grealy@sydney.edu.au

Themes and objects

energy / thermodynamics / history of science /geo-theology / climate politics

Readings for Discussion

• Daggett, Cara New. 2019. ‘2. A steampunk production’ and ‘3. A geo-theology of energy’ in The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work, pp. 33-82. Durham & London: Duke University Press.

Background

• Todd, Zoe. 2017. ‘Fish, kin and hope: Tending to water violations in amiskwaciwâskahikan and Treaty Six territory. Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, 43(1), pp. 102–107.

Questions to Guide the Reading:

2. A steampunk production

• How does Daggett argue that thermodynamics consolidates its place as the science most capable of explaining change, including the role of fossil fuels in perpetuating change as progress?
• What does it mean to identify energy and entropy as human constructs, recognised as such by physicists themselves? Consider the metaphor of Dennis the Menace, his mother, and his blocks. Pp.39-41
• How does a human-centric view underpin the second law of thermodynamics, and its relationship with an apparently contradictory first law? P.44
• What are the implications for establishing energy as a ‘unit of equivalence’ for contemporary environmental politics? P.47

3. A geo-theology of energy

• [Questions to come]

Themes and objects

energy / fossil fuels / extraction /climate politics

Readings for Discussion

• Daggett, Cara New. 2019. ‘Introduction’ and ‘1. The novelty of energy’ in The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work, pp.1-32. Durham & London: Duke University Press.

Background

• Harris, Malcolm. 2020. ‘Shell is looking forward.’ NYMag. 3 March.
• Perkins, John. 2019. Daggett, Cara New. ‘Review: The birth of energy: fossil fuels, thermodynamics, and the politics of work.’ Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. 10. 106-108.
• Byrne, Paul. 2019. ‘Mining the moon.’ The Conversation. 5 March.

Questions to Guide the Reading:

Introduction

• Daggett appropriates Donna Haraway’s neologism ‘natureculture’ as a way to characterise ‘energy’. In Daggett’s genealogical approach, what aspects of energy does this application make evident? (Pp.5-6)
• Is it useful to understand ‘energy’ as a ruling idea, in Marx’s sense? (Pp. 6-7)
• Daggett highlights the way that fossil fuel companies have rebranded as energy companies. Elizabeth Shove describes a similar abstraction by Hal Wilhite in the argument that ‘people do not “consume” electricity’ in any meaningful sense, but rather ‘consume cultural energy services like lighting, heating, and cooling’. What are the similarities or differences between Daggett and Shove, in terms of how they might encourage rethinking of energy production and use?

Chapter 1

• How does the origin of the term energy – with its connotations of movement, vigour, expansion, trajectorism – continue to to haunt discussions of energy infrastructure and climate politics in the present? Can the term be decoupled for the Western colonial world-making project? (Pp. 17-19)
• Deforestation coupled with narrow opportunities for backburning on the eastern seaboard of Australia have created a landscape of potent fuel, a catastrophe for which only Indigenous fire management practices might be in a position to redress. Discourses of conservation, progress, management, and risk mitigation are at odds with each other in a particularly dangerous way when we consider how to survive the fire seasons to come. How does the notion, that Daggett traces back to Heraclitus, of conservation as a primary principle of both the constancy and transformational potentials of energy, relate to contemporary energy crises and the question of how to regulate the massive energy stores in a dry country? (Pp. 20-21)
• What is the impact of ‘reading fossil fuels through the lens of human power’ rather than imagining that technological/industrial innovation as producing new forms of power? How might this inversion shape the way we understand other infrastructures? (Pp. 30)

Themes and objects

cleanliness / home / laundries / consumption / convenience

Readings for Discussion

• Shove, Elizabeth. 2003. ‘7. Laundering: A System of Systems’, ‘8. Laundry Habits: INtegrating Practices’, and ‘9. System and Service’ in Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality, pp. 117-167. Oxford and New York: Berg.

Background

• Bring your own texts

About the reading: What norms structure dominant approaches to domestic design? What actions, but also feelings, does the housing assemblage facilitate? What relations are established between internal and external environments that support particular sorts of lives and livelihoods? And what is life like when houses do not meet legislated minimum standards, let alone design best practice? What does sustainable design look like in contexts at the threshold of human comfort and cleanliness?

In the next session the Infrastructural Inequalities reading group will continue reading Elizabeth Shove’s book, Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality. This builds on the June session and conversations begun in 2018 on infrastructure, architecture, water, waste, words, wires, data, and extraction. Three chapters from Shove are framed by short optional texts on design, bathrooms, and cleanliness.

Themes and objects

comfort / cleanliness / home / bathrooms / consumption

Readings for Discussion

• Shove, Elizabeth. 2003. ‘4. Regimes of comfort: Systems in transition’, ‘5. Introducing cleanliness: Morality, technology and practice’, and ‘6.  Behind the bathroom door: Revolving rationales’ in Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality, pp. 65-116. Oxford and New York: Berg.

Background

• Healthabitat. 2020 ‘How does a bathroom fail to function?‘ Housing for Health: The Guide. 
• 99% Invisible. 2020. ‘Wipe out.’ 4 July.

About the reading: What norms structure dominant approaches to domestic design? What actions, but also feelings, does the housing assemblage facilitate? What relations are established between internal and external environments that support particular sorts of lives and livelihoods? And what is life like when houses do not meet legislated minimum standards, let alone design best practice? What does sustainable design look like in contexts at the threshold of human comfort and cleanliness?

In the next session the Infrastructural Inequalities reading group will continue reading Elizabeth Shove’s book, Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality. This builds on the June session and conversations begun in 2018 on infrastructure, architecture, water, waste, words, wires, data, and extraction. Three chapters from Shove are framed by short optional texts on design, bathrooms, and cleanliness.

Themes and objects

comfort / sustainability / home / heat / climate

Readings for Discussion

• Shove, Elizabeth. 2003. ‘1. Consumption, everyday life and sustainability’, ‘2. The science of comfort: Constructing normality’, and ‘3. The co-evolution of comfort: Interdependence and innovation’ in Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality, pp. 1-64. Oxford and New York: Berg.

Background

• Lea, Tess. 2014. Extract from Darwin, pp.33-34. Sydney: New South Publishing.
• Heschong, Lisa. 1979. ‘Delight’ in Thermal Delight in Architecture, pp.18—30. Cambridge, Ma: The MIT Press.
• Allam, Lorena and Evershed, Nick. 2019. ‘Too hot for humans? First Nations people fear becoming Australia’s first climate refugees’. The Guardian. 18 December.

Connections

• Miriam Charlie. ‘No country, no home.’ (July18 – Architecture)
• Shove, Elizabeth, Walker, Gordon, and Brown, Sam 2014. ‘Material culture, room temperature and the social organisation of thermal energy.’ Journal of Material Culture. 19(2): 113-124 (July19 – Wires)
• Lea, Tess and Pholeros, Paul. 2010. ‘This is not a pipe: The treacheries of Indigenous housing.’ Public Culture. 22(1): 187-209. (May18 – Infrastructural Introductions)
• Fennell, Catherine. 2011. ‘“Project heat” and sensory politics in redeveloping Chicago public housing.’ Ethnography. 12(1): 40-64. (June18 – Architecture)

About the reading: What norms structure dominant approaches to domestic design? What actions, but also feelings, does the housing assemblage facilitate? What relations are established between internal and external environments that support particular sorts of lives and livelihoods? And what is life like when houses do not meet legislated minimum standards, let alone design best practice? What does sustainable design look like in contexts at the threshold of human comfort?

In the next session the Infrastructural Inequalities reading group will begin reading Elizabeth Shove’s book, Comfort, Cleanliness and Convenience: The Social Organization of Normality. This builds on conversations begun in 2018 on infrastructure, architecture, water, waste, words, wires, data, and extraction. Three chapters from Shove are framed by short optional texts on thermal comfort, and connections can be drawn to past texts.

Themes and objects

narratives / storytelling / land / ethnography / racialisation /rhetoric

Readings for discussion

• Tuck, Eve and Yang, K. Wayne. ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor.’ Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society. 1(1): 1-40.
• De Santolo, Jason, Hoosan, Gadrian, and King, Bruce. ‘Yanyba Jarngkurr, Kingkalli: Song tradition renewal and story-world enactments of sustainable autonomy.’ In J.A. Archibald, J. Lee-Morgan and J. De Santolo (eds) Decolonizing Research: Indigenous Storywork as Methodology. London: Zed Books.

Background

• Jenkins, Fiona. 2020. ‘Did our employers just requisition our homes?‘  The Canberra Times. April 4.
• Wang, Jackie. ‘Against innocence: Race, gender, and the politics of safety.’ LIES Journal. 1(10).

Further

• Vincent, Eve. 2019. ‘Storytelling, statistics, and the ethics of responsibility.’ Commoning Ethnography. 2(1): 27-51.
• Wolfe, Patrick. 1999. ‘Repressive authenticity.’ In Settler Colonialism and the transformation of anthropology. London: Bloomsbury.

Themes and objects

data / labour / modelling /prediction / abstraction / governmentaltity

Readings for discussion

• Crawford, Kate and Joler, Vladan. 2018. ‘Anatomy of an AI system: The Amazon Echo as an anatomical map of human labor, data and planetary resources.’
• Mezzandra, Sandro and Neilson, Brett. 2017. ‘On the multiple frontiers of extraction: Excavating contemporary capitalism.’ Cultural Studies. 31(2-3): 185-204.

Background

• Urban Institute. 2019. Prisoner assessment tool targeting estimated risk and needs (PATTERN) interactive tool. 4 September.
• The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. 2020. ‘Letter to Attorney General Barr RE: The use of PATTERN risk assessment in prioritizing release in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.’ 3 April.
• Gerrard, John. 2015. Farm (Pryor Creek, Oklahoma 2015): afternoon.

Further

• Murphy, Michelle. 2019. ‘Introduction: Bottles and curves.’ In The Economization of Life, 1-14. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
• Burrington, Ingrid. 2015. ‘The Environmental Toll of a Netflix Binge.’ The Atlantic. 16 December.

Themes and objects

Extraction / Accumulation by dispossession / Resources / Mining / Land

Readings for discussion

• Marx, Karl. [1867] 1976. “The secret of primitive accumulation”, “The expropriation of the agricultural population from the land”, “The genesis of the industrial capitalist”. Capital Volume 1, pp.873-895 and 914-926.
• Estes, Nick. 2019. “Siege”. Our history is the future, pp. 25-66. London: Verso.

Background

• Doherty, Ben. 2019. “Queensland extinguishes native title over Indigenous land to make way for Adani coalmine.” The Guardian. 31 August.
• Malm, Andreas. 2016. “Fossil capital: The energy basis of bourgeois property relations.” Fossil capital: The rise of steam power and the roots of global warming, pp.320-326. London: Verso.

Further

• O’Reilly, Rachel. “Drawing rights”. The gas imaginary. (Video work, 17’08”)
• Ihlein, Lucas. Baking earth: Soil and the carbon economy. (Video and documentation)
• Howey, Kirsty. 2020. “The Ranger uranium mine agreement revisited: Spacetimes of Indigenous agreement-making in Australia.” Transformations. (33): 96-115.

Themes and objects

Technology / Solutionism / Externalities / Climate / Infrastructure / Labour

Readings for discussion

• Altman, Jon. 2019. “Of pizza ovens in Arnhem Land: The state quest to restructure aboriginal labour in remotest Australia.” In Victoria Stead and Jon Altman (eds) Labour lines and colonial power: Indigenous and Pacific Islander labour mobility in Australia, 279-307. Canberra: ANU Press.
• Mulvaney, Dustin. 2013. “Opening the black box of solar energy technologies: Exploring tensions between innovation and environmental justice.” Science as Culture. 22 (2): 230-237.

Background

• Howe, Cymene, Lockrem, Jessica, Appel, Hannah, et al. 2016. “Paradoxical infrastructures: Ruins, retrofit, and risk.” Science, Technology, and Human Values. 41 (3): 547-565.
• Cesafsky, Laura. 2017. “How to mend a fragmented city: A critique of ‘infrastructural solidarity’.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. 41(1): 145-161.

Further reading

• Cherry, Catherine, et al. 2017. “Homes as machines: Exploring expert and public imaginaries of low carbon housing futures in the United Kingdom.” Energy Research and Social Science. 23: 36-45.

About the reading: In Lachhmani Village, Odisha in The Solar Fix (see Wires), broken solar lanterns are scattered through the streets – replacement parts are unavailable or exorbitantly priced. At an Indigenous housing conference, an audience member suggests ‘remote community residents should build houses using locally available materials’, as a means to increase housing stock, expand community autonomy, and reduce carbon outputs. Gokce Günel (see Water) describes the proliferation of desalination plants in the Arabian Peninsula as underpinned by and contributing to a fantasy of water’s infinity. The practice of innovating novel, often one-off, design and technological responses to difficult problems is seductive and widespread.

The technoscientific fix specifies the limits of our infrastructures to meet contemporary and future needs. Often, it inserts itself as a means to maintain unsustainable lifestyles, relations, and desires. Even where the fix responds to contemporary ecological demands, the power of the commodity fetish can mystify related matters of infrastructural inequality (extraction, manufacturing, waste), and displace the less charismatic, ongoing attentions that all ‘solutions’ require: maintenance, repair, replacement, iteration, and so on.

This month thinks in relation to the conventional humanities critique of the technofix, which points to sustainability issues, negative externalities, and which seeks to rework problem definitions and extend social and temporal horizons. We consider the utility and limits of this critique, and the grounds by which we might evaluate proposed fixes or appropriate technologies.

Themes and objects

Data-sets / Prediction / Algorithms / Race / Housing / Financialisation

Readings for discussion

• Eubanks, Virginia. “High tech homelessness in the City of Angels”. In Automating Inequalities: How high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor, 84-126. New York: St Martin’s Press.
• Wang, Jackie. 2017. “‘This is a story about nerds and cops’: Predpol and algorithmic policing”. e-flux journal. 87 (December).

Background

• Sentas, Vicki and Pandolfni, Camilla. 2017. Policing young people in NSW: A study of the suspect targeting management plan. Sydney: Youth Justice Coalition. (Recommended pp. 2-16)
• Crawford, Kate and Paglen, Trevor. N.d. “Excavating AI: The politics of images in machine learning training sets.”
• Inside Air BnB

Further reading

• Whelan, Andrew. 2019. “‘Ask for more time’: Big data Chronopolitics in the Australian welfare bureaucracy”. Critical Sociology. 1-14.
• Fields, Desiree. 2018. “Constructing a new asset class: Property-led financial accumulation after the crisis.” Economic Geography. 94 (2): 118-140.

Themes and objects

EXTRACTION AND ENERGY FUTURES

Readings for discussion

• Szeman, Imre. 2007. “System failure: Oil, futurity, and the anticipation of disaster”. South Atlantic Quarterly 106 (4): 805-823.
• Whyte, Kyle Powys. 2018. “Indigenous science (fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral dystopias and fantasies of climate change crises”. Environment & Planning E: Nature and Space 1 (1-2): 224-242.

Background

• Cross, Jamie. The Solar Fix.
• Indigenous Clean Energy.
• Fitzwilliam, Kevin 3.6.19. Will Louisiana’s rural electricity co-ops help an “oil state” break free of fossil fuels? The Lens.

Further reading

• Rezaei, Maryam and Dowlatabadi, Hadi. 2016. “Off-grid: Community energy and the pursuit of self-sufficiency in British Columbia’s remote and First Nations communities.” Local Environment 21 (7): 789-807.
• Powell’s, Dana E.  2015. “The rainbow is our sovereignty: Rethinking the politics of energy on the Navajo Nation.” Journal of Political Ecology 22: 53-78.
• Boyer, Dominic. 2018. “Infrastructure, potential energy, revolution”. In N. Anand, A. Gupta, and H. Appeal (eds) The Promise of Infrastructure, 223-244. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

THE GRID AND THE HOME

Readings for discussion

• Needham, Andrew. 2014. “Sunbelt Imperialism: Boosters, Navajos, and energy development in the metropolitan southwest.” In M. Nickerson and D. Dochuk Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Space, Place, and Region Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest, 240-264. University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Shove, Elizabeth, Walker, Gordon, and Brown, Sam 2014. “Material culture, room temperature and the social organisation of thermal energy”. Journal of Material Culture 19 (2): 113-124

Background

• Best, Jo. 2019. “The great disconnect: Sustainable housing and energy efficiency in the Top End”. January 1.
• Bakke, Gretchen. 2016. “Ageing and unstable, the nation’s electrical grid is ‘the weakest link’.” August 22.
• Department of Energy. Infographic: Understanding the grid.

Further reading

• Tietz, Christian. 2013. “The secret lives of stoves in remote Australian Indigenous communities.” fusion (1). N.p.
• Byrd, Hugh and Matthewman, Steve. 2014. “Energy and the city: The technology and sociology of power.” Journal of Urban Technology 21 (3): 85-102.

Themes and objects

Themes and objects

Themes and objects

Bureaucracy / Files / Law / Consent / Administrative Violence / Paperfare

Readings for discussion:

• Gupta, Akhil. 2012. “‘Let the train run on paper’: Bureaucratic writing as state practice.” Red tape: Bureaucracy, structural violence and poverty in India, 141-169 only. Durham: Duke University Press.
• Hull, Matthew. 2012. “The expropriation of land and the misappropriation of lists.” Government of paper: The materiality of bureaucracy in urban Pakistan, 162-185 only. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Background:

• Kafka, Franz. 1920. Poseidon.
• #NotMyDebt.

Further reading:

• Simpson, Audra. 2016. “Consent’s revenge.” Cultural Anthropology. 31(3): 326-333.
• Lea, Tess, Howey, Kirsty, and Justin O’Brien. 2018. “Waging paperfare: Subverting the damage of extractive capitalism in Kakadu.” Oceania. 88(3): 305-319.

This is the first of three sessions dedicated to the theme “Words”. A description of all the readings follows.

About the readings: Housing depends on a web of documentary infrastructure. Such documents legitimate, facilitate, mediate, and constrain individual relations to home and property: as deeds, contracts, vouchers, insurance premiums, tenancy records, credit ratings, criminal convictions, and fines. Documentary infrastructure also represents and directs what, how, and where construction and maintenance take place, through land tenure leaseholds, development plans, zoning, surveys and floodplain mapping, and so on. Laws and policies represented in and enacted through documentary infrastructure establish standards, and articulate processes aimed at guaranteeing those standards, for material objects and our relations to them. The National Construction Code, for example, sets building and plumbing performance requirements in relation to safety, health and amenity, accessibility, and sustainability. Healthabitat developed the additional National Indigenous Housing Guide (“The Guide”) to provide best practice recommendations for Indigenous housing and amenity. Funded by the Commonwealth Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs since its inception, support for the third edition was withdrawn in 2006 when concerns surfaced that its best practice recommendations could be interpreted as minimum standards with significant cost implications. The potential impact of printed words was undone by the withdrawal of government approval and the recall of physical guides. Thus the prescriptive effects of a voluntary guide dissipated into freedoms for contractors to continue building to minimum cost and lower standards.

Documents have subjectifying effects, producing us as (non)citizens, corporations, consumers, and so on, with attendant rights and obligations and penalties for failing to meet them. The social contract, liberal government’s legitimating non-event, provides a generic fiction for imperial and settler colonial regimes historically grounded in expropriation and territorial expansion. Laws and policies follow this original presumed consent. However, such characterisations of singular Law and Policy risk misrepresenting the diverse forms and practices of documentary worlds. Like pipes and wires, documentary infrastructure, whether paper or digital, assumes distinct material forms that facilitate exchange across particular terrains. Documents produce interdependent social networks and by doing so consolidate the legitimacy and necessity of policy-making, implementation, audit, and policing regimes. Colonial technologies including files, records, permits, dockets, reports, releases, petitions, letters, and lists, as well as graphic artefacts like maps and surveys, make up the documentary ecologies within bureaucracies, encapsulating and generating their routines, standards, banalities, and excitements. The content of documents conveys data deemed of future utility or significance, to be recorded and stored in files, folders, incorporated into databases, archived or deliberately hidden. Such documentary cultures, beyond the carpet worlds of policy design, can be experienced as assurance or burden – the means of administrative violence. Litigation and paperfare recognise that the demands of record-keeping, paperwork, and resultant surveillance impact disproportionately on the relatively time-poor, under-resourced, and variously literate in bureaucratic jargon – slow death by a thousand papercuts. Such documentary ecologies also contribute to the exclusion of vulnerable people from adequate housing (as records, fines, and debts accrue), and to increasing their dependence on the labour of legal aid and social work professionals who are themselves increasingly subject to both the administrative and audit demands of grants that sustain their employment. This situation is most evident in the increasingly banal (but no less tragic) events of default and eviction.

Our focus on “Words” extends across the three months of March, April, and May 2019. We retain the format of 2018 with the final month dedicated to discussion of shorter texts and questions contributed by reading group members. Eve Vincent joins us to co-coordinate the readings and discussions for the first two months, which are distinguished broadly to consider bureaucratic cultures and a specific documentary technology: the fine. In March, Akhil Gupta’s chapter considers the relationship between state power and writing and their infliction of violence on India’s poor. Matthew Hull’s chapter (which follows one on files), examines the enactment of government compensation regimes for house and land expropriation in villages on the outskirts of Islamabad. The short background piece by Franz Kafka represents Poseidon’s bureaucratic relationship with the sea, while the further readings by Audra Simpson and Tess Lea, Kirsty Howey, and Justin O’Brien explore the settler colonial administration of Indigenous peoples’ lives and different forms of resistance and refusal to that administration. In April, Michel Foucault’s lecture from The birth of biopolitics series describes the emergence and logic of the much maligned neoliberal governmentality, including its opposition to discourses of morality and ab/normality. Melinda Cooper’s article examines how this logic plays out in the imprisonment of Indigenous Australians for defaulting on fines. Background readings provide further contemporary instances of the administrative violence of fines, and responses to this, while the further readings by Wendy Brown, Thalia Anthony, and Liam Grealy consider, respectively, the incorporation of neoliberal governmentality into legal reason, the extension of crime discourses to police driving offences, and fantasies of paperlessness in Northern Territory policing.

Themes and objects

Territory / Colonialism / Contamination / Repurposing / Ritual / Use Value

Reading for discussion:

• Liboiron, Max. 2018. “Waste colonialism“. Discard Studies. 1 November.

This is our last session for 2018 before the university closes for the holiday period. Following the format taken so far, this second session on waste will be organised around the objects submitted by participants, in addition to a blog post by Max Liboiron. We encourage everyone to submit a short text or object to prompt collective discussion that connects with the themes examined on waste so far, and infrastructural inequalities broadly. Be creative, and bring a question for the group. Please submit your contributions to liam.grealy@sydney.edu.au a week before the group is scheduled to meet (December 4^th for December 11^th) and I’ll upload these to the shared dropbox folder.

A few more examples:

• Bush Mechanics. 2001. Dir. David Batty. Walpiri Media Association. https://goo.gl/UtxvjS
• Marian Tubbs. Vulgar Latin. https://vimeo.com/87376943
• Into Eternity. 2010. Dir. Michael Madsen. Films Transit International. https://goo.gl/8S27wm

Themes and objects

Design / Management / Governance / Consumption / Extraction / Time / Decolonisation

Readings for discussion:

• Ureta, Sebastian. 2016. “Caring for waste: Handling tailings in a Chilean copper mine.” Environment and Planning A. 48(8): 1532-1548.
• Bird Rose, Deborah. 2003. “Decolonizing the discourse of environmental knowledge in settler societies.” In Gay Hawkins and Stephen Muecke (eds) Waste and culture: The creation and destruction of value, 53-72. Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield.

Background:

• “B3. Removing waste water safely” and “How a bathroom fails to function.” In Housing for Health: The guide. https://goo.gl/JRPozB https://goo.gl/k4Fvbz
• Bardon, Jane. 2017. “McArthur River mine: Environmental concerns deepen over Glencore’s expansion plan.” ABC. 7 June. https://goo.gl/ie4CAX
• Reno, Joshua. 2015. “Waste and waste management.” Annual Review of Anthropology. 44: 557-572.

Further reading:

• Clark, Nigel and HIrd, Myra J. 2013. “Deep shit.” O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies. Autumn(1): 44-52.
• Hawkins, Gay. 2007. “Waste in Sydney: Unwelcome returns.” PMLA. 122(1): 348-51.
• Pascoe, Bruce. 2014. Dark Emu. Black seeds: agriculture or accident? Broome: Magabala Books.
• Junka-Aikio, Laura and Cortes-Severino, Catalina. 2017. “Cultural studies of extraction.” Cultural Studies. 31(2-3): 175-184.

The ‘November – Waste’ session is the first of two monthly discussions on waste. As in the two meetings dedicated to Architecture and Water respectively, the first session is organised around set readings, while the second (in December) is led by the contributions of group members.

About the reading: The presence of waste demands its disappearance, through its elimination or circulation elsewhere. For Healthabitat, ‘Removing waste water safely’ is a key priority of improving housing for householders’ increased health benefits. This is more easily said than done. Flush toilets, drains, septic tanks, and other technologies employed for the removal and treatment of waste water contend with shoddy parts, improper design and installation, practices of daily use, and environmental conditions to work effectively. Disposing of waste water safely in housing is one example of the much larger governmental project of managing waste’s removal and elimination through infrastructural solutions. Such technical responses to this by-product of human activity generate new forms of labour, reform environmental landscapes, and demand new geopolitical relations, while the unsustainability of waste sustains the expansion of waste management industries. Alongside elimination and removal, waste management also involves a range of prevention and diversion activities, among them reuse, recycling, repair, and maintenance.

Waste management is not simply a technical exercise, but is indicative of waste’s cultural ontologies. Mary Douglas famously described dirt as ‘matter out of place’, and structuralist readings have variously examined cultural practices of spatial separation and containment. The presence of waste is an impediment to particular forms of life and sovereign fantasies, and the removal of this negative eternality of economic production has repeatedly exploited ‘peripheral’ geographies and people. Former industrial reserve armies of labour, increasingly transformed under late capitalism into surplus populations, contend with the necropolitical impulses of co-locating waste and displaced people on former frontiers and other undesirable landscapes. As Jane Bennett notes, however, waste is ‘materially recalcitrant’, and its removal does not preclude its return: as leachate contaminated water, regurgitated sewage, oceanic garbage patches, as PCBs in atmospheric dust clouds, and in children contaminated by lead. These are not simply failures of containment but signal waste’s temporalities, including its long durations, its lingering presence, and the capacity of objects to transform from desirable commodity to garbage and back again. Driving a car propels the object through its use time towards its abandonment. But waste time provides the immanent potential of the object’s recuperation into economies of value.

The readings for discussion approach caring for waste from different angles. Sebastian Ureta examines care explicitly, in relation to the practices involved in handling tailings in a Chilean copper mine. Ureta questions our ability to manage tailings, if management implies the technical resolution or containment of potential harm, and instead promotes care as a frame for understanding ethical obligations to ongoing entanglements with industrial by-products. In a different register, Deborah Bird Rose considers how the accusation of wastefulness is employed within settler-colonial scholarship to exclude Indigenous people from discourses of ecological knowledge, care, and sustainability. Against the opposition between living in harmony with the environment and destructive wastefulness, Bird Rose’s decolonial approach demonstrates the conceptual and political implications of unreflexive evaluations of Indigenous people’s practices as wasteful. The background readings provide examples of the everyday management of human and extractive wastes – in water that fails to drain through clogged pipes and leachate that requires management long beyond profitable activity. Joshua Reno’s review summarises key themes in contemporary discard studies, including waste’s materialities, its governance, and its activity trails. In the further readings, Nigel Clark and Myra J. Hird examine bacterial life-worlds fostered and expaneded by human waste cultures; Gay Hawkins considers the role of waste in developing habits and collective politics; Bruce Pascoe (especially chapter 5) provides an account of Indigenous infrastructures concerned with storage, preservation, and the ecological sustainability referred to by Bird Rose; and Laura Junka-Aikio and Catalina Cortes-Severino’s introductory essay provides an overview of contemporary cultural studies approaches to extractivism.

Themes and objects

Themes and objects

Home / Design / Construction / Rebuilding / Climate Change / Settler Colonialism

Reading for discussion:

• Schlunke, Katrina. 2016. “Burnt houses and the haunted home: Reconfiguring the ruin in Australia.” In Nicole Cook, Aidan Davison and Louise Crabtree (eds) Housing and home unbound: Intersections in economics, environment and politics in Australia. 218-231. Routledge: Abingdon and New York.

About the reading: Drawing on the conversations that have taken place in the May and June sessions, this second architecture session is organised around the texts and objects contributed by participants. The chapter by Katrina Schlunke follows those focused on affordable housing design by Dillon and Savage, Sullivan, and Fennell, and provides an alternative style for interrogating questions of home, rebuilding, climate change, and settler colonialism, that might inform individual contributions. We encourage everyone to bring a short text or object to prompt collective discussion that connects with the conversations we’ve had together so far. This might include a photograph, newspaper article, popular media example, policy, art object, memory, family treasure, and so on. Be creative, and bring a question for the group.

A few examples:

• Carmen Argote. ‘720 sq. ft. Household mutations.’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2tpn-Pq230
• Keg de Souza, incl. ‘Living under the stars’. http://www.kegdesouza.com/portfolio/living-under-the-stars/
• Miriam Charlie. ‘No country, no home.’ https://www.artlink.com.au/articles/4496/miriam-charlie-no-country-no-home/
• Open Mike Eagle. 2017. ‘Brick Body Complex’. Brick Body Kids Still Daydream. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQxXubLTIBw

Housing / Design / Construction / Repair & Maintenance / Crowding / Precarity / Abandonment

Readings for Discussion:

• Dillon, Jane and Savage, Mark. 2003. “House design in Alice Springs town camps.” In Paul Memmott (ed.) Housing Design in Aboriginal Australia. 40-48.
• Sullivan, Esther. 2014. “Halfway homeowners: Eviction and forced relocation in a Florida manufactured home park.” Law & Social Inquiry. 39(2): 474-497.
• Fennell, Catherine. 2011. “‘Project heat’ and Sensory Politics in Redeveloping Chicago Public Housing.” Ethnography. 12(1): 40-64.

Background:

• Aboriginal Housing NT. “Housing Forum 2018.” http://www.amsant.org.au/apont/our-work/forums/housing-forum-2018/
• Pholeros, Paul and Phibbs, Peter. 2012. “Constructing and maintaining houses.” Closing the gap clearinghouse. Resource sheet no. 13. 1-19.

Further reading:

• Lea, Tess. 2012. “Ecologies of Development on Groote Eylandt.” Australian Humanities Review. 53 (November).
• Wilson, Ara. 2016. “The Infrastructure of Intimacy.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 41(2): 247-280.
• Hinkson, Melinda. 2017. “Precarious Placemaking.” Annual Review of Anthropology. 46: 49-64.

In this ‘June – Architecture’ session we are experimenting with streaming a live feed of the reading group (link to be added). Those who can are encouraged to join the discussion in person, but anyone who is located elsewhere is welcome to listen in and submit their thoughts or questions for discussion beforehand. Following conversation in our inaugural ‘May – Infrastructure’ session we’re interested in establishing ongoing consideration of methodological questions related to how we might research, write about, and otherwise represent infrastructural inequalities of different kinds. As the first of two sessions dedicated to architecture, we’re also interested in how we might structure the second (July) session differently, including as a collaborative discussion organised in relation to texts or objects contributed by group members. See ‘July – Architecture’ below for a potential format, open for discussion in our ‘June – Architecture’ session.

About these readings: What does affordable housing look like? Affordable housing advocacy understandably prioritises the issue of supply: more housing is needed for more people. Architectural questions are equally important. Housing design and construction significantly impact on subsequent repair and maintenance requirements and on householders’ utilities expenses. Affordability should not only be determined by original construction costs or rental payments relative to income, but by the total ongoing costs for housing authorities and home owners to maintain the function of housing stock as health hardware. For Graham and Thrift, ‘Architectures are morphogenetic figures forged in time, tacking against a general entropic tendency’. Things falls apart; anticipating when, how, and why are important architectural considerations.

Architectural problems are not simply a matter of austerity politics leading policies that trade quality design and repair and maintenance budgets to reduce total spending. Developing models of appropriate affordable housing design, as for all architecture, involves complex intersections between aesthetic, functional, material, and cost considerations. The mode of delivery – public, market, or public-private partnership – can bear on housing design, including whether vernacular styles are incorporated or generic designs are reproduced across disparate locations. The development of specific technologies, such as active cooling systems for homes, also contributes to the universalising tendency of house design, as well as to the geography of housing construction and to normalising householder desires, including regarding thermal comfort. In Australia, architectural standardisation has underpinned strategies for modular housing to be centrally manufactured and assembled on-site, with mixed results as construction contends with the more-than-human challenges of building in tropical and desert environments. In the United States, the circulation of manufactured housing undermines its advertised mobility; materials stretch, fracture, and degrade such that housing becomes stuck, while homeowners’ mobility is forced through eviction.

This is the first of two sessions dedicated to the theme of architecture. Building on our prior readings and discussion around infrastructure, we are interested here in the consideration given to architecture by policy approaches to affordable housing provision, in Indigenous housing in Australia and elsewhere. The readings for discussion describe different styles of affordable housing design – individual houses in town camps, mobile homes, and modernist public housing towers – that provide affordances for particular social relations, pedagogies for modes of everyday living, and demands and responsibilities for householders as tenants and citizens. Jane Dillon and Mark Savage’s short chapter outlines design considerations for building houses in the town camps of Alice Springs, which is timely given the recently released Town Camps Review. Esther Sullivan’s article describes how manufactured, or ‘mobile’, housing expands home ownership but not necessarily housing security, which as in remote Indigenous communities (albeit differently) requires control of the land on which housing is located. Catherine Fennell’s article connects shifts in public housing design to broader patterns in welfare reform and identifies the withdrawal of repair and maintenance services as a strategy of abandonment to hasten the justification for policy change. Background readings summarise important factors for consideration in the construction and maintenance of Indigenous housing in Australia and preliminary outcomes from the NT Aboriginal Housing Forum (March 2018). For those who are especially keen, the further readings provide additional material for theorising infrastructure and precarity, as well as case studies of architectural failure in Australian housing provision. Together, these readings frame housing as a material assemblage that produces ongoing design and repair challenges, as environments act on buildings and buildings organise the actions of tenants, tradespeople, policy makers, and others.

Infrastructure / Housing / Policy / Indigeneity

Readings for discussion:

• Lea, Tess and Pholeros, Paul. 2010. ‘This is Not a Pipe: The Treacheries of Indigenous Housing.’ Public Culture. 22(1): 187-209.
• Larkin, Brian. 2013. ‘The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.’ Annual Review of Anthropology. 42: 327-43.

Culture:

• Genevieve Murray and Joel Sherwood-Spring, ‘Spatial Dynamics of Resistance’   

Additional reading:

• Graham, Stephen. 2010. ‘When Infrastructures Fail.’ In Stephen Graham (ed.) Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructure Fails, 1-27. Routledge: New York and London.
• Rodgers, Dennis and O’Neill, Bruce. 2012. ‘Infrastructural violence: Introduction to the special issue.’ Ethnography. 13(4): 401-412. 10(5): 364-374.

About these readings: Our first reading group session is an opportunity to discuss our key themes and concepts and to establish some collective interests for the months ahead. After this initial session on ‘infrastructure’ we anticipate holding two monthly sessions on each of architecture, water, wires, waste, and words. We hope that group members will lead the second session related to each of those themes, drawing on their own expertise and research and the group’s shared interests.

The idea of infrastructural inequalities is influenced by Healthabitat’s conception of housing as ‘health hardware’. How does the materiality of housing – the affordances to wash people, wash clothes and bedding, remove waste water safely, store and cook food, and so on – bear on the health and well-being of householders? Or, how does housing that is insufficient in quantity and of inadequate quality contribute to health inequality? Tess Lea and Paul Pholeros’s article examines the outcomes of Indigenous housing policies proclaimed as successes in press releases and inside the carpet-lands of bureaucracies. On the ground, pipes are disconnected from systems that would safely remove waste water but connected to systems of audit and administration, and sheds masquerade as houses: the non-houses of policy delivery. Determining who or what has failed, and where and how, in the chains of policy formulation, planning, industrial design, contracting, procurement, construction, and maintenance, is the necessary challenge of developing better Indigenous housing outcomes. Blithe responses blame ‘the government’, or more often, and incorrectly, Indigenous householders (see https://goo.gl/PjK3oR).

The Housing for Health Incubator and Snack Syndicate, as co-organisers of this group, are interested in locating housing in relation to other systems that bear on householders’ health outcomes. Drawing on the article by Brian Larkin, we take a broad understanding of infrastructure, as ‘material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space’, and which facilitate and impede social action and networks. Housing for low-income earners, whether in urban or remote contexts, is likely to suffer from inadequate investment in adjacent infrastructures such as accessible public transport systems, reliable energy grids, healthy food provision and reliable and safe water supplies, and municipal services. Such housing is also more likely to be co-located with infrastructures that are undesirable for residential property values and variously toxic to householders, such as proximity to water and waste treatment facilities, electricity plants, land-fills, freeways, flight paths, swamps, and industrial zones. Larkin’s seminal article provides an erudite overview of different approaches to infrastructure, on behalf of our future sessions, and shares with Lea and Pholeros an anthropological orientation toward sites of governmental decision-making and practice, along with users of infrastructures themselves. The additional readings draw attention, respectively, to breakdown and repair as the typical, rather than exceptional, state of infrastructure (Graham 2010), and to the differentiated distribution of this experience, under conditions of ‘infrastructural violence’ (Rodgers and O’Neill 2012). Genevieve Murray and Joel Sherwood-Spring describe the emergence of the Future Planning Centre and collective political action that responds to ongoing gentrification in Redfern and Waterloo.

We suggest the following as useful preparation for the group:

• ‘The Healthy Living Practices.’ 
• Laurie, Victoria. 2011. ‘Home Improvement: Indigenous Housing.’ The Monthly. 11 June.
• Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2008. ‘The Child in the Broom Closet: States of Killing and Letting Die.’ South Atlantic Quarterly. 107(3): 509-530.
• Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. 2015. ‘2. The House that Jack Built: Britishness and White Possession’ in The White Possessive: Property, Power and Indigenous Sovereignty, (19-32). University of Minnesota Press.

About these readings: The Housing for Health Incubator is partnered with Healthabitat, a not-for-profit company focused on improvements in the material conditions of housing for Indigenous people and other disadvantaged groups. Healthabitat developed the highly regarded Housing for Health method, which is the basis of their survey-fix work on behalf of housing safety and nine Healthy Living Practices that housing should support. Victoria Laurie’s essay in The Monthly provides a background to Healthabitat’s work, including the central role played by the late Kunmanara Lester and the formidable Paul Pholeros, along with fellow original and continuing directors Paul Torzillo and Stephan Rainow. Laurie’s essay locates this on-the-ground work in the broader context of Federal policy on remote Indigenous housing, which is now approaching the conclusion of the National Agreement on Remote Housing (formerly NPARIH) and ongoing funding uncertainty outside of the Northern Territory. Elizabeth Povinelli’s essay develops a distinction between the forms of lethality of state killing and letting die as one way we might understand the perennial threat of funding reduction and withdrawal and the connection to the unspectacular suffering and slow death of marginalised people. So too the entrenched low expectations for policy success and material standards in Indigenous housing, such as aims to reduce overcrowding to levels that would remain well above acceptable measures in Australia’s urban centres. Finally, Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s chapter details how settler-colonialism and whiteness are ongoing projects that require symbolic and material reenactments, including by academic disciplines, to deny Indigenous sovereignty. Anticipating the reading group sessions to come, and more specifically the relations between contemporary tenure arrangements, housing provision, and extractive industry, the readings pose a shared question: on what do good lives depend and for whom?