Infrastructured lives: assembling politics and liveable life in contemporary Kenya

Projektbeschreibung

„Infrastrukturieren“ als Prozess in Kenia

Spricht man vom „Infrastrukturieren“ statt von „Infrastruktur“, verweist dies eher auf einen gesellschaftlich und politisch vermittelten Wandel des Körpers im Rahmen von und durch staatliche gelenkte Megaprojekte. So werden Menschen auf abstrakte Einheiten reduziert – wie Bürgerschaft, Gruppen von Begünstigten oder Nutzungsgruppen von Infrastruktur. Infrastruktur wird dadurch ein Fundament materieller und semiotischer Gewalt im kapitalistischen Staat. Das EU-finanzierte Projekt INFRALIVES befasst sich mit Mega-Infrastrukturen in Kenia heute. Es legt eine ethnografisch fundierte theoretische Analyse über soziale und politische Geografien der aktuellen Mega-Infrastrukturen vor. Kritische Sozialtheorie (unter anderem die Werke von Theodor Adorno, Judith Butler, Francis Fanon und Achille Mbembe) mit Bezug zu wissenschaftlichen geografischen Erkenntnissen über Infrastruktur bilden die Grundlage der Arbeit.

Ziel

"The proposed project focuses on mega-infrastructures in contemporary Kenya and provides an ethnographically-grounded theoretical account of social and political geographies of contemporary mega-infrastructures. It accomplishes this by theorising how semiotic and material forms of mega-infrastructures – which by their nature produce space – simultaneously function as technologies of governance that articulate contested imaginaries of ""progress"" and ""development"", and, at the level of everyday practice, shape (im)possibilities of liveable life across uneven landscapes of contemporary Kenya. Through this theorisation of mega-infrastructures, I explore how, in the current neoliberal conjecture of capitalist development in the Global South, infrastructure is a verb and not a noun. It is not a symbol of ""development"" that states use in their attempt to achieve national prosperity. Instead, in the contemporary context of mega-projects, to infrastructure is to expose populations to multi-faceted forms of semiotic and material subjugation to state and capital power. Therefore, infrastructure as a process cannot be understood as externally imposed on populations; instead, the process of infrastructuring is a socially and politically mediated transformation of the body in and through state-directed mega-projects that reduce human beings to abstractions – such as citizens, beneficiary groups, or infrastructure users – which renders infrastructure as fundamental to the material and semiotic violence of the capitalist state. Theoretically, the proposed project draws on critical social theory – including the work of Theodor Adorno, Judith Butler, Francis Fanon, and Achille Mbembe – in relation to geographical scholarship on infrastructure, and through these original theoretical explorations, the account of infrastructured lives provides a novel contribution to critical scholarship on political and social geographies of infrastructure."