‘Eating mountains’ and ‘eating each other’:Disjunctive modernization, infrastructural imaginaries and crisis in Greece

Since the eruption of the Greek crisis in 2010 it has been almost impossible for the Greek state authorities to initiate any infrastructural project without significant local and wider resistance. In this paper we seek to answer how infrastructures became novel arenas of political conflict in Greece. We suggest that crucial for understanding this process is the dynamic relationship between infrastructures and popular political imaginaries. During the recent ‘golden’ period of infrastructural development in the country (mid-1990s to mid-2000s) there was a mutually constitutive relationship between popular imaginations of progress and the materiality of infrastructures, which attempted to underplay the disjunctive modernization processes within which that development took place. Later though, this parallel relationship between the two was contested as the infrastructural imaginary, which was transformed by the everyday discourses and practices created around infrastructure projects, blurred the expectations and imagination ascribed to the ‘glorious’ period of national success and modernization. In combination with the infrastructural gap of the crisis, the narrative dimension started taking over the materiality of infrastructures allowing it to take on a life of its own. Understanding the mechanisms of this relationship between imaginary and infrastructural materiality is key to comprehending the Greek economic crisis without a crisis essentialism that attributes every process into the crisis per se

A Social Framework for Big Data

The Social Framework proposes an agenda that understands how social composition and social effects are related and proposes that giving Big Data a ‘social intelligence’ requires acting with an ethic of care. It is the product of an ESRC funded project, Socialising Big Data, led by Evelyn Ruppert (2013-14). Accompanying documents that are available are a working paper, 'Socialising Big Data: from concept to practice' and 'Background: A Social Framework for Big Data.

Background: A Social Framework for Big Data

This is a Background document to 'A Social Framework for Big Data', which proposes an agenda that understands how social composition and social effects are related and proposes that giving Big Data a ‘social intelligence’ requires acting with an ethic of care. The Background provides a discussion of some conceptual issues and debates related to this agenda. Both documents along with a working paper, 'Socialising Big Data: from concept to practice' are the product of an ESRC funded project, Socialising Big Data, led by Evelyn Ruppert (2013-14)

Infrastructural disorder: The politics of disruption, contingency, and normalcy in waste infrastructures in Athens

This paper considers infrastructure from the point of view of disorder. During the last few years, waste management controversies have proliferated in Greece, reflecting a generalized feeling of mistrust towards the authorities. In this context, and in relation to the socio-economic crisis that erupted there in 2010, a set of diverse and even antithetic practices, imaginations, and circulations of flows have (re)emerged around waste treatment processes. By looking at the intermingling of formal and informal practices around waste flows and landfill processes in Athens, the paper asks how uncertainty, contingency and instability shape the governance and everyday experience of waste infrastructures. Examining the ways in which the normalization of regular disruption and instability plays out in waste treatment in Athens, it makes the case for understanding disorder as inherent to infrastructure

THE FALL OF THE 'PURIFIED' COMMUNITY: CRISIS, TRANSFORMATION & COLLECTIVE ACTION IN GREECE

The article explores the recent social and political transformations in Greece through events of collective action in the public space of Athens. Drawing on Richard Sennet’s notion of the ‘myth of the purified community’ it is argued that these events demonstrate a gradual disintegration of the social imaginary of the idea of community in various scales (national, local, etc). This argument builds on the indistinction between public and private as reflected in these events in Athens. By providing ethnographic examples from both before and after the economic collapse, the article explains crisis as a long process of contesting the sovereignty of the state and institutions in Greece and how these previously downplayed contestations were rendered visible in the Greek public sphere. This visibility shakes the foundations of the notion of a homogeneous community as it is established by the ‘social contract’