The term infrastructure denotes the built network that allows goods, people, energy and knowledge to circulate over geographic space. We find infrastructures in our environments, even rural and remote areas are generally connected in one form or another. It is often said that they sustain our societies, however, they are in themselves socio-technological structures that shape and change society, culture, politics and economies. They have the capacity to change us and the ways in which we interact and relate to others and the other-than-human world.
Infrastructures, hence, bring about certain worlds ‒ and by ‘worlds’ we mean interdependent sets of conditions of being and relating to other living beings and the natural world. Whilst contemporary infrastructures facilitate flows of materials and persons, they also contribute to generating a zoned world that is divided into purpose-specific geographic areas, designated to natural resource extraction, production, consumption, or waste disposal, for instance. Through transport routes all those fragmented territories become connected to the global circuits of capital in specific ways.
Our podcast Infrastructure (Re)worldings explores, on the one hand, in what ways infrastructures make, unmake and remake worlds, and how they impact on local communities, their social fabric and relationships with others and the natural world around them.
On the other hand, we want to engage with entirely new and unimagined infrastructures that allow the reproduction of life without reconfiguring relational worlds in violent ways. Community organisers, land defenders, researchers, historians and other guests will help us understand the implications of current and past infrastructure projects and explore new infrastructural imaginations.
In this podcast you will hear how worlds get made, unmade and remade through infrastructures across the world. Our guests help us imagine entirely new and different infrastructural worlds that you might have never thought of.
Episode 1
Susanne Hofmann talks to Astrid Paola Chavelas about women’s experiences and perceptions of the Interoceanic Corridor infrastructure project.
Episode 2
Astrid Chavelas talks to professor Carlos Wallenius about what megaprojects are and how they impact on peasant and indigenous communities in Mexico.
Episode 3
Astrid Chavelas talks to Candelaria Castellanos about the situation of women and non-binary people in contexts in which socioenvironmental conflicts exist.
Episode 4
Astrid Paola Chavelas talks to Mario Castillo Quintero, member of the Assembly of Peoples of the Isthmus in Defence of Land and Territory (APIIDTT) about green economies in Mexico.
Episode 5
Astrid Paola Chavelas talks to social anthropologist Alejandro Castaneira (Autonomous University of Mexico, Iztapalapa) about histories of dispossession in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.
Episode 6
Rita Valencia talks to Alexander Dunlap, researcher at the University of Oslo’s Centre for Development and the Environment, about the violent technologies of ‘green’ infrastructures.
Episode 7
Susanne Hofmann talks to Leonor Díaz Santos, member of the Council of United Peoples in Defense of the Río Verde river (COPUDEVER), Afro-Mixteca and defender of her territory, the river and the water.
Episode 8
Gemaly Padua Uscanga interviews Pedro Uc Be, poet, writer, philosopher and member of the Assembly of Defenders of the Mayan Territory Múuch’ Xíinbal about the Mayan Train project.
Episode 9
Rita Valencia converses with Josefa Contreras, Indigenous thinker from the Chimalapas whose intellectual inquiries are linked to the organisational processes of territorial defence.
Episode 10
Astrid Chavelas interviews José Raymundo Díaz Taboada, coordinator of the Collective Against Torture and Impunity (CCTI) about organising against the hydroelectric dam La Parota.
Episode 11
Rita Valencia talks to Gilberto López y Rivas, professor at the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) about megaprojects and Indigenous peoples’ relationship with the state.
Episode 12
Gemaly Padua Uscanga talks to Rosa Marina Flores Cruz from Indigenous Futures about the consequences of the global North’s green energy boom and Indigenous alternatives.
Episode 13
Susanne Hofmann talks to anthropologist and activist Mónica Montalvo from Sandía Digital about the history of hydroelectric projects in Mexico and resistance against them, with examples from Jalisco and Nayarit.
This website is part of the research project “Gender Violence and Security in the Interoceanic Industrial Corridor of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec: A Critical Examination of Policies and Practices”, and has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 844176.
