Eventful infrastructures: Contingencies of socio-material change

Infrastructures long tended to remain only in the background of socio-cultural studies and theories, seeming too technical, obdurate, and uneventful for the latter's grand narratives of social change. Yet, amidst a flurry of changes in social theory itself, recent years has seen growing interest across a range of disciplines in the roles and capacities of material agencies generally, and technologies and infrastructures in particular, to exert influence over the trajectories of social life. Reviewing a broad set of literatures informed primarily by science and technology studies (STS), this chapter proposes three analytical avenues along which to take seriously the eventful socio-technical nature of infrastructures. First, in engaging the centrality of infrastructures as the material substrate of modernity writ large, the chapter spells out an analytic sensibility equally attuned to slow-moving accretions and continuities as to critical junctures and shifts within purportedly modern socio-technical settlements. Second, taking a clue from the inherently contingent and open-ended nature of events, the chapter turns to political demonstrations as sites of infrastructural contestations with potentially multifaceted effects across temporally far-flung situations. Third, situating itself within the current conjuncture of multiple ecological crises, the chapter ends by suggesting that this so-called Anthropocene situation gives rise not only to new risk-laden anticipations of future catastrophes but serves also to throw all infrastructure into a perpetual state of socio-technical unrest.