infrastructure | Platypus

Commodifying Disability as an Experience

 Mine Egbatan  August 20, 2024

Since February 2023, I have been conducting fieldwork on disabled women’s access to and experience of infrastructure under the current populist authoritarian government in Turkey. My research has taken me, among other places, extensively throughout Istanbul, the city with the largest disabled population in the country. I have traveled primarily by public transportation to meet with my interlocutors, most of whom are blind, allowing me to experience urban infrastructures alongside them. While passing through Gayrettepe Station, one of the busiest subway stations in Istanbul due to its location in a business district and near an upscale shopping mall, I observed a sentence written on a black background with white neon points: “Learning is possible through encounters” (Öğrenmenin yolu karşılaşmaktan geçer). This area is home to a museum called “Dialogue in the Dark” and “Dialogue in the Silence,” which provides a multisensory corporeal experience of blindness and deafness targeting non-disabled people as an audience. The museum draws inspiration from other “Dialogue in the Dark” museums located in Europe, and was established by a civil society organization. These museums are significant initiatives aimed at helping non-disabled people understand how “others” experience the built environment, thereby raising awareness about the inequalities and injustices that disabled people may encounter in their daily lives. Disability activism is relatively new in Turkey and values any effort that contributes to the recognition of disability as an identity, which has not been widely acknowledged. Indeed, creating a space for encounter is crucial for cultivating a culture of pluralism, understanding, and care for one another, all of which are crucial for a democracy. In some countries, populist movements are explicitly hostile to disabled folks, and/or ridicule them (e.g. Trump in the US), however, this is not the case in Turkey (disabled women face other challenges, as we will see). So, such initiatives regarding disabled people are quite welcome, as they may contribute to Turkey’s democratization and the inclusion of non-normative bodies and existences. (read more...)

On Disability, Infrastructure, and Shame

 Elizabeth Roberts  June 18, 2024

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Content note: This piece centers an evolving journey with internalized ableism and accompanying feelings of virtue and shame, particularly around public transportation, driving, and accessibility. Readers can step back from this piece if it is too difficult to read right now. I did not expect Northern Europe to make me more disabled than the United States and Mexico—more disabled and more ashamed. In 2015, I began experiencing chronic nerve pain on my right side—hip and shoulder—which developed in response to a complex musculoskeletal condition. By 2019, I could not walk more than a few blocks or lift much with my right arm, and if I climbed too many stairs in a day, I would pay for it later. In addition to walking, I stopped being able to bike, swim, or hike. Some days just moving around the house or doing the dishes would activate agonizing pain. Over time, I stopped going to places where I couldn’t drive. (read more...)

Milei, Crowds, and Concrete Waves in Argentina

 Renzo Taddei  December 21, 2023

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I am home, reading Stefan Helmreich’s new book, A Book of Waves (2023). The news on TV then catches my attention: I see images from the inauguration of Argentina’s new president, Javier Milei. The syntagmatic association is obvious: Milei is a new addition to the wave of authoritarian populist rulers now in office. I let out a long sigh, thinking about the future of my relatives and friends in Buenos Aires. Once again, I failed miserably in my ability to forecast election results. Previously, I missed the mark for the 2016 elections in the US and the 2018 elections in Brazil. For many years, my anthropological work has been with forecasts, albeit atmospheric ones (e.g., Taddei 2015, 2020). I often poke fun at my friends in meteorology, telling them that society is more complex than the atmosphere—perhaps to justify why we in the social sciences are so bad at forecasting collective human behavior. In any case, I have the feeling that, of all the uses of the wave metaphor, perhaps this one, associated with extreme rightwing nationalistic politics at the international stage, is the most elusive and misguiding. Is the waviness of the phenomenon derived from any measurable feature, like it is for natural phenomena such as physical ocean waves or El Niño? Or is the waviness just ascribed afterward simply as a familiar semantic container for a myriad of facts so that the public can hold it in their minds? In any case, physical oceanographers also read waves backward. They call it an inverse problem (Helmreich 2023, 258). (read more...)

AI as a Feminist Issue

 Ana Carolina de Assis Nunes  September 5, 2023

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By choosing to look at the funding from the American Government on this field, I aim to tell a different story about AI. A quick search for the word “librarian” on Google reveals images upon images of women holding books amongst big shelves, attending to patrons, reading stories for children, or stocking book shelves. Librarian is one of those professions that, like many others, such as nurse and secretary, have been associated with the female world. If this text is about AI, you might be asking why I’m writing about libraries and librarians–but as scholars Safyia Noble (2018) in her Algorithms of Oppression and Monica Westin (2023) more recently have shown, what most people in Western countries usually understand as the internet, and what fuels the data collection of digital information that feeds generative artificial intelligence (AI) such as ChatGPT, was first started in the 1970s by groups of librarians (read more...)

The Perfect Fit

 Claudio Benzecry  April 18, 2023

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In my new book, The Perfect Fit: Creative Work in the Global Shoe Industry (University of Chicago Press, 2022) I study the work of repair and maintenance necessary to keep the global scale going. I do so by studying the work and lives of experts in charge of the design and development of shoes for the US market. Research for this project began in 2012. I conducted five years of research between New York City (USA), Dongguan (China), and Novo Hamburgo (Brazil), scrutinizing the friction between expert work and cheap labor in the production of a ubiquitous commodity: leather shoes for the US women’s market. Low-level commodity production is not usually thought of as a place where knowledge is produced. Rather, it is studied either through a global value-chain approach or an attention to shop-floor politics. In this unexpected match between case and theory, I aim to defamiliarize the work of coordinating tacit and embodied forms of knowing. (read more...)

As Above, So Below: Vertical Territory in Northern Sweden

 Chakad Ojani  February 28, 2023

Space exploration in northern Sweden often gains meaning in relation to mining. In this blog post, I ask: how does mining serve as a “speculative device” (McCormack 2018) for envisaging a future beyond Earth? I was drawn to the topic of outer space infrastructures by the Swedish Space Corporation’s ongoing expansion of its rocket launch site, located outside the subarctic city of Kiruna. This expansion aims to turn what has thus far been a sounding rocket range into a full-fledged launch site for small satellites, undertaken in anticipation of a dramatic increase in the demand for launch services over the forthcoming decades. The land occupied by the spaceport and its impact area, twice the size of Luxembourg, interferes with the reindeer herding lands of four Sámi villages. In early 2022, I traveled to Kiruna to begin inquiring into the politics of space exploration in Sweden, focusing in part on the relation between the launch site and the reindeer herders. Yet, eluding my questions about space and instead shifting the conversation to mining, several of the herders I spoke with urged me to consider how outer space was often shot through the region’s long-running history of underground resource extraction. (read more...)

Is it Going to Be Okay? / Est-ce que ça va aller?

 Rine Vieth  February 21, 2023

This is is a multilingual comic that serves as a meditation on the infrastructures of COVID-19, care, and time. In the spirit of the multilingual spaces I inhabit in Tio’tia:ke/Mooninyaang/Montréal, I have chosen to write bilingually—a process that can be messy, but that speaks to my experiences of COVID-19 locally as I am thinking of COVID-19 globally. (read more...)