Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological literature that seeks to theorize infrastructure by drawing on biopolitics, science and technology studies, and theories of technopolitics. I also examine other dimensions of infrastructures that release different meanings and structure politics in various ways: through the aesthetic and the sensorial, desire and promise.

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The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure

In Latin America indigenous politics has been branded as “ethnic politics.” Its activism is interpreted as a quest to make cultural rights prevail. Yet, what if “culture” is insufficient, even an inadequate notion, to think the challenge that indigenous politics represents? Drawing inspiration from recent political events in Peru—and to a lesser extent in Ecuador and Bolivia—where the indigenous–popular movement has conjured sentient entities (mountains, water, and soil—what we call “nature”) into the public political arena, the argument in this essay is threefold. First, indigeneity, as a historical formation, exceeds the notion of politics as usual, that is, an arena populated by rational human beings disputing the power to represent others vis-a-vis the state. Second, indigeneity's current political emergence—in oppositional antimining movements in Peru and Ecuador, but also in celebratory events in Bolivia—challenges the separation of nature and culture that underpins the prevalent notion of politics and its according social contract. Third, beyond “ethnic politics” current indigenous movements, propose a different political practice, plural not because of its enactment by bodies marked by gender, race, ethnicity or sexuality (as multiculturalism would have it), but because they conjure nonhumans as actors in the political arena.

Indigenous Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections Beyond "Politics"

Preface 1 Participatory Design: An introduction by Toni Robertson and Jesper Simonsen Section I: Participatory Design - Contributions and Challenges 2 Heritage: Having a Say by Finn Kensing and Joan Greenbaum 3 Design: Design Matters in Participatory Design by Liam Bannon and Pelle Ehn 4 Ethics: Engagement, Representation and Politics-In-Action by Toni Robertson and Ina Wagner 5 Ethnography: Positioning Ethnographic within Participatory Design by Jeanette Blomberg and Helena Karasti 6 Methods: Organizing Principles and General Guidelines for Participatory Design Projects by Tone Bratteteig, Keld Bodker, Yvonne Dittrich, Preben Mogensen, and Jesper Simonsen 7 Tools and Techniques: Ways to Engage Telling, Making and Enacting by Eva Brandt, Thomas Binder and Elizabeth Sanders 8 Communities: Participatory Design For, With, and By Communities by Carl DiSalvo, Andrew Clement and Volkmar Pipek Section II: Outstanding Applications of Participatory Design 9 Global Fund for Women: Integrating Participatory Design into everyday work at a global non-profit by Randy Trigg and Karen Ishimaru 10 Health Information Systems Program: Participatory design within the HISP network by Jorn Braa and Sundeep Sahay 11 ACTION for Health: Influencing Technology Design, Practice and Policy Through Participatory Design by Ellen Balka

Routledge International Handbook of Participatory Design

Presented in two parts, this article proposes a research programme devoted to examining ‘processes of economization’. In the first instalment, published in Economy and Society 38(3) (2009), we introduced the notion of ‘economization’. The term refers to the assembly and qualification of actions, devices and analytical/practical descriptions as ‘economic’ by social scientists and market actors. Through an analysis of selected works in anthropology, economics and sociology, we discussed the importance, meaning and framing of economization, unravelling its trace within a variety of disciplinary backgrounds. This second instalment of the article explores what it would mean to move this research programme forward by taking processes of economization as a topic of empirical investigation. Given the vast terrain of relationships that produce its numerous trajectories, to illustrate what such a project would entail we have limited ourselves to the examination of processes we call ‘marketization’. These p...

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Economization, part 2: a research programme for the study of markets

This paper discusses the design of things. This is done in an attempt to conceptually explore some of the political and practical challenges to participatory design today. Which things, and which participants? The perspective is strategic and conceptual. Two approaches are in focus, participatory design (designing for use before use) and meta-design (designing for design after design). With this framing the challenge for professional design to participate in public controversial things is considered.

Participation in design things

Another monumental ZKM publication, redefining politics as a concern for things around which the fluid and expansive constituency of the public gathers; with contributions by more than 100 writers and artists. In this groundbreaking editorial and curatorial project, more than 100 writers, artists, and philosophers rethink what politics is about. In a time of political turmoil and anticlimax, this book redefines politics as operating in the realm of things. Politics is not just an arena, a profession, or a system, but a concern for things brought to the attention of the fluid and expansive constituency of the public. But how are things made public? What, we might ask, is a republic, a res publica, a public thing, if we do not know how to make things public? There are many other kinds of assemblies, which are not political in the usual sense, that gather a public around things - scientific laboratories, supermarkets, churches, and disputes involving natural resources like rivers, landscapes, and air. The authors of Making Things Public - and the ZKM show that the book accompanies - ask what would happen if politics revolved around disputed things. Instead of looking for democracy only in the official sphere of professional politics, they examine the new atmospheric conditions - technologies, interfaces, platforms, networks, and mediations that allow things to be made public. They show us that the old definition of politics is too narrow; there are many techniques of representation - in politics, science, and art - of which Parliaments and Congresses are only a part. The authors include such prominent thinkers as Richard Rorty, Simon Schaffer, Peter Galison, Richard Powers, Lorraine Daston, Richard Aczel, and Donna Haraway; their writings are accompanied by excerpts from John Dewey, Shakespeare, Swift, La Fontaine, and Melville. More than 500 color images document the new idea of what Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel call an "object-oriented democracy."

B. Latour P. Weibel

Papers

Making Things Public : Atmospheres of Democracy