Inter-area/Border Crossing

Organized Panel Session

Infrastructural Imaginaries II: Spaces of Alterity

Infrastructures of the modern world shape everyday life, socio-economic hierarchies, popular perceptions of space and movement, and prominent images of the individual, corporation, nation, region, and world. This includes not only physical infrastructures, such as sewer systems, communications networks, railroads, and highways, but also virtual systems that define spaces, control movement, and mediate interactions by defining borders, territoriality, and citizenship. Infrastructure, which has recently emerged as a key site of study across the social sciences and humanities, joins disparate concerns about space, mobility, and circulation across scales and boundaries. In this pair of border-crossing panels, scholars from six disciplines, comparing examples from as many countries, will explore the ways infrastructures produce physical and imagined spaces.

This second of two panels takes up the role of infrastructures in creating spaces of alterity. From Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City, to the “holy infrastructure” of South Korea’s Sarang Church, to the opaque and bewildering legal regime governing flows of refugees, we examine diverse representations to probe how infrastructures operate in real and imagined spaces. How and when do the language, composition, and material of infrastructure lend themselves to the creation of spaces of alterity? How do the technical and historical realities of infrastructure compare to their interpretation in photographs, lawsuits, and literature? What can gaps between real and imagined spaces tell us about how infrastructures operate in the world? Each presenter will speak for 15 minutes, after which we will pose a few shared questions to promote fruitful discussion with the audience.

Organizer(s)

• JA

  Jessamyn Abel

  Pennsylvania State University

Chair(s)

• TC

  Tina Chen

  Pennsylvania State University

Paper Presenter(s)

• CC

  Carrie Cushman

  Wellesley College
• MH

  Mai-Linh Hong

  Bucknell University
• HM

  Heather Mellquist Lehto

  University of Toronto, Canada

Papers:

• 5:15 PM - 7:00 PM

  Infrastructure Comes Alive: Miyamoto Ryūji’s Photographs of Kowloon Walled City
• 5:15 PM - 7:00 PM

  Real and Imagined Infrastructures: Hamid’s Exit West and the Global Refugee Regime
• 5:15 PM - 7:00 PM

  Holy Infrastructure: Church Architecture, Gangnam Style