Queering as (un)knowing:Ambiguities of sociality and infrastructure

Putting queer theory in dialogue with critical infrastructure studies, this article proposes a theoretically, methodologically and empirically expansive reading of queer epistemologies. Reiterating the expansiveness of queer theory as an intellectual and political endeavour, the article argues that queering might also be perceived, and engaged with, as a theoretical and practical concern with non-linear, ambiguous, never-fully-knowable textures of subjectivity, self and social life, such as those implicated in mega-infrastructure development. Exploring this, the article develops the case for approaching queering as (un)knowing – an epistemology to foreground ambiguities of the social – intended to build expansive forms of solidarity.</p

Politics of Disavowal:Megaprojects, Infrastructural Biopolitics, Disavowed Subjects

Focusing on the construction of Lamu Port as a focal point of the Lamu Port–South Sudan–Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET) Corridor in Kenya, this article explores how megainfrastructures are entangled with processes of life-making and -unmaking, thus producing specific subject dispositions within a state’s infrastructural biopolitics as infrastructure-based capacitation and control of national populations. Analyzing sociopolitical effects of state-led megaprojects, civil society mobilization, and livelihoods of artisanal fishermen, the article develops a theoretical account of a politics of disavowal—a tacit denial of a state-admitted responsibility and support to vulnerable populations that, despite formal inclusion into the state’s development visions, are rendered constitutively absent within biopolitical spatialities of life advanced by the state. Thereby, the article triangulates the binary of bio- and necropolitics standardly deployed in multiple theorizations of (re)production of liberal capitalist life in geographical and interdisciplinary literatures on biopolitics, necropolitics, or politics of infrastructure. It specifically foregrounds how governance of vulnerable, expendable populations does not oscillate between intentional life- and death-making, flourishing and effacement, bio and necro but unfolds as a politics of disavowal—a confluence of formal recognition and material neglect by the state, expressed as a dialectic of presence and absence, inclusion and neglect

Scenes of subjection:Extractive frontiers, symbolic violence, dispossession

This article discusses how, besides structural and direct modes of violence traditionally attributed to natural resource exploitation, extractive frontiers also unfold through material and affective registers of symbolic violence. This concerns the violence of capital that promises a “better life” whose actual realisation, directly implicated in circuits of “free” market economy, is constantly deferred to the future. Empirically grounded in experiences of dispossession and resettlement caused by coal extraction in Tete, Mozambique, the article employs symbolic violence as an analytic to understand subjectivation constituted by the failed promise of “development” of Tete’s extractive frontier. This, the article argues, results in specific scenes of subjection – exposure to the symbolic violence of extractivism, as well as potential contestations of it, through which those dispossessed by mining come into being as subjects of power. These scenes of subjection are temporal: they transform – expand, flutter, retreat – reflecting broader, inherently unstable economies of extraction. As such, subjection to violence is not final but remains susceptible to contestation, mediation, or escalation. Nevertheless, the article shows how, in spite of this potentiality of change, until recently, in Tete symbolic violence had justified, reproduced, and sustained the power of extractivism, as well as of capital more broadly, even within the lifeworlds dispossessed, or otherwise laid to waste, by extractive frontiers of capital

Enduring Colonial Grammars of Self:Infrastructure, Coloniality, Ethnicity

Building on critical geographical scholarship on racialism and coloniality reiterated through infrastructure systems, this article explores how inherently colonial constructs of ethnicity-as-identity—as sub-genres of humanity and further biopolitical differentiation of Blackness—are reworked through contemporary mega-infrastructures. Focusing on the development of Lamu Port in Kenya, it analyses how infrastructures entrench pre-existing symbolic and material divisions between ostensibly different ethnic groups and how they perceive themselves within Kenya's body politic. Doing this, the article demonstrates how mega-infrastructures actively reproduce the sub-genres of humanity that were set in motion during the colonial period as categories inscribing the racialised, constitutive otherness to Whiteness. The coloniality of power, therefore, endures, reverberating through infrastructures into materialities of the present and the everyday of peoples who continue to rely on colonial grammars of sub-humanisation to maintain a sense of self in the world of not their own making.</p

Disquieting ambivalence of mega-infrastructures:Kenya’s Standard Gauge Railway as spectacle and ruination

Putting research on the socio-political effects of Kenya’s new Standard Gauge Railway in conversation with geographically and anthropologically grounded scholarship on infrastructure, the article analyses how megaprojects, in spite of state spectacles of infrastructure-qua-development, are embroiled in multiple modalities of ruination. It specifically highlights how mega-infrastructures disrupt ecologies of social reproduction: the new railway disorders people’s mobility patterns and their access to essential infrastructures, as well as decouples their labour from transport systems and informal road economies central to self-sustainment. The article conceptualises these intersections between infrastructure’s spectacle and ruination as disquieting ambivalence of infrastructure. Shifting from spectacle to ruination – rather than oscillating between the two – this ambivalence is not one of uncertainty, malleability, or open-ended futures that are analysed in recent strands of critical scholarship on infrastructure, in which material devastation is often bracketed due to this literature’s predominant focus on multiple temporalities of infrastructure as heterogeneous possibilities of reconfiguration. The article, instead, shows that this ambivalence of infrastructure is disquieting – fraught with precarity, struggle, and despair, as the lives of those in shadows of mega-infrastructures need to be rebuilt within the ruins of the here and now, and of infrastructure’s spectacle

Infrastructured bodies: Between violence and fugitivity

This article traces the trajectory of critical geographical scholarship on the body’s intertwinement with infrastructure systems. In doing so, it argues that although the body is not ontologically infrastructure, it can nevertheless enable infrastructure’s functioning – whether by being made into infrastructure of surplus value production or by suturing widening gaps in sub-optimal infrastructure systems. Analysing these dynamics, the article theorises the body as infrastructured – given over to the violence of capital and its infrastructures that subject specifically gendered, racialised, and classed bodies to surplus value extraction and/or abandonment; but also as simultaneously fleeting in its irreversible exposure to this violence

Infrastructure as techno‐politics of differentiation: Socio‐political effects of mega‐infrastructures in Kenya

Abstract: The Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) in Kenya, inaugurated in 2017, has been promoted by the Kenyan government as a promise of “development” and “prospering people.” This paper demonstrates how, contrary to these narratives, the SGR reiterates the pre‐existing relations of difference mediated by class, geography, and ethnicity. Focusing on material and semiotic forms of the SGR infrastructures, it specifically shows how the railway project functions as the techno‐politics of differentiation that governs by including “prospering publics” of urban middle classes into Kenya's modernist development vision, providing unstable hopes for “development” to more precarious peri‐urban and rural “anticipating populations,” but simultaneously constituting “excluded populations” in rural landscapes that are denied the possibility of being a part of the national modernist development vision. Highlighting this intimate relationship between infrastructure, governance, and biopolitics, the paper demonstrates that mega‐infrastructures – differentiating between the publics included in, and the populations excluded from, the state's development visions and practices, as well as unstable subjective dispositions in‐between – engender modalities of non‐belonging that fall outside of (inherently liberal) frames of “citizenship” or a “public” frequently employed in critical infrastructure scholarship

Quantifying rate enhancements for acid catalysis in CO 2 -enriched high-temperature water

Thermodynamic calculations revealed that 10 to 100-fold increases in reaction rate are obtainable with added CO 2 (0.1–1 MPa) for an acid-catalyzed reaction in high-temperature liquid water (HTW) that is first order in H + concentration. These calculations suggest that CO 2 is most effective as a rate-enhancing additive in HTW at lower temperatures (150–200°C). When compared with increased temperature as a competitive option for accelerating acid-catalyzed reactions in HTW, CO 2 addition generally carries a lower pressure penalty (and no temperature penalty) for the model acid-catalyzed reaction with activation energies of up to 35 kcal/mol. An experimental survey revealed that CO 2 addition is effective for achieving increased reaction rates for dibenzyl ether hydrolysis in HTW, but that bisphenol A cleavage, methyl benzoate hydrolysis, and o -phthalic acid decarboxylation were not significantly impacted by added CO 2 . This behavior is consistent with previous results for these reactions wherein mineral acid, rather than CO 2 , was added to lower the pH. A summary of experimental results reported for reactions in CO 2 -enriched HTW revealed that product yields of some reactions can be increased by a factor of 23 with added CO 2 . Taken collectively, these results suggest that CO 2 addition may be a practical technique for making HTW more attractive as a reaction medium for acid-catalyzed organic synthesis. © 2007 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 2008Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/57897/1/11392_ftp.pd

Towards more sustainable and inclusive development corridors in Africa

Development corridors are linear programmes of infrastructure and agriculture aiming to facilitate rapid socio-economic development. In Africa, they are a major development activity, with 88 underway or planned corridors. Drawing from extensive literature and insights gleaned from a 4-year research programme, this review scrutinizes the impacts of development corridors on people, wildlife and ecosystems in Kenya and Tanzania, proposing solutions to achieve better outcomes. The overarching goal was to discern the principle challenges emerging from the practical execution of the prevailing corridor model. The holistic approach taken, assessing the development corridors paradigm through an integrated ecological, social, and economic lens, provides novel insights that have not been possible using more traditional – siloed – research approaches. Eight key challenge areas are identified: impact assessments processes; coherence across international, national and local planning; governance; inclusivity; equality; impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services; incorporation of future climate risks; and integrated water resource management. Poorly planned and implemented corridors detrimentally impact livelihoods and ecosystems. They lack a sustainable development vision, detailed social, environmental or climate risk assessments, and develop incrementally in policy and corporate spaces. There is also often a disconnect between investors and recipient governments, with some investors funding what governments request without applying internationally-recognised safeguards, and governments lacking capacity and resources to enforce regulations. We make recommendations for addressing these challenge areas. These aim to enhance impact assessment efficacy; integrate local perspectives into effective and inclusive corridor planning; overcome siloed project development and implementation; anticipate future development projections; and prioritise landscape preservation for enhanced ecosystem services and climate resilience