What can we learn about a system by examining not what it is made of but how it works?

Manu Karuka’s Empire’s Tracks, a re-telling of the history of the intercontinental railroad, was published only months before the 150th anniversary of the railroad’s completion. The celebrations of the railroad as a symbol of national unity and progress are a reminder of its continued power in writing the myth of the nation, and of the importance of challenging such nation-valorizing narratives.

‍Lines are willfully ignorant of volume. Precisely because of this, lines are forced to confront volume at every turn. As they strive to abstract themselves down to one dimension, lines must negotiate endlessly with all three stubbornly material dimensions. Their linearity is never more than a bargain of convenience, a tolerable approximation of an abstract ideal. Abstraction is not itself an abstract process.

This video feature accompanies the article “The social production of container space”Although a sizable body of popular and academic literature explores how shipping containers have reconstituted the spaces through which they travel, the space within containers themselves remains largely unexamined.

I propose an understanding of "privacy" in the home as a peculiar infrastructure because of the incongruity between the lived experience of the employee and the employer.

If the obituaries failed to give a balanced account of Munk’s legacy, they were effective at revealing how extractive projects function as a nation-state building infrastructure in Canada.

In November 1911, the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata solidified his agrarian ideology in the Plan de Ayala, a declaration calling for the protection of peasants' rights to land and liberty (Wolf 1969). Now in 2018, a coalition of peasant, indigenous, and Afro-Mexican organizations has put forward the Plan de Ayala Siglo XXI (21st Century Plan of Ayala), which renews this platform on peasants’ rights to resources, government entitlements, and political representation.

Understanding unseeing as an infrastructure reframes the conflict in Jerusalem, exposing the less spectacular forms of violence that sustain Israeli settler colonialism.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and other military alliances have recognized cyberspace as an essential operational domain of international conflict. The militarization of cyberspace has led to the recruitment of digital soldiers, experts in technology who carry out state sanctioned cyber attacks and political subterfuge.

On January 22, 1999, then US President Bill Clinton warned the National Academy of Sciences about the nation’s need to bolster their defenses against two new terrorist “tools of destruction” - biochemical warfare and computer hacking (Clinton, 1999). In the most explicit terms, computer hackers were catapulted to the same level of dangerousness as those terrorist groups who might use chemical or even nuclear weapons against the West.

In 2002, the Indian state launched a “high-priority" national project to build the first rail line that would connect India’s capital city, New Delhi, to Baramulla, a city on the northern tip of Indian-occupied Kashmir. The 345 kilometre Jammu-Baramulla line, also known as the “Kashmir Railway Project,” has been under construction for the past 16 years and is yet to be completed.

The increasingly common conjunction of contemporary art and logistics (Toscano and Kinkle, 2015) might be cause for incredulity in some quarters—not least those of logistics specialists or art historians. However crucial to the working of contemporary economic life—so much so that theorists have taken to speak of a shift to supply chain capitalism (Tsing, 2009)—the visible manifestations of this material theory and practice of the circulation and assembly of commodities appear stamped by an inexorable banality, especially in that modular metonym for global capital as a whole, the container.

The South Caucasian Republic of Georgia is at the center of ambitious infrastructural investments aimed at transforming the country into a logistics hub for the Chinese-lead New Silk Road project. These developments are reshaping Georgian territory as well as its economy, making for a logistics revolution.

Holiday Mountain Fun Park, in the rural Hudson Valley region of New York state, boasts a number of rides and attractions that are colorful, if past their 1980s prime. The only one that registered for the group of eight 13-year old boys in our summer research program, however, was the go-kart track.

Like many of the world’s large cities, Tkaronto/Toronto is constituted by deepening divides. [1] The homeless population is growing and dying. The housing market is booming and displacing. The city is accumulating and concentrating wealth and other toxins.