Masterclass: Infrastructure: A Wider Ontology (Dr. Maan Barua)

In the masterclass “Infrastructure: A Wider Ontology”, Maan Barua proposes that infrastructure should not be understood merely as the basic technical equipment of modern societies, but as a structure that organises everyday life, materialises power and shapes entire environments. The starting point is the question of what worlds infrastructures actually create and what forms of experience they enable or limit. Barua focuses specifically on more-than-human dynamics: infrastructures not only accelerate the flow of goods, people or data, but also set other forms of life in motion or hold them in place, often with intended and unintended consequences. Another focus is on incompleteness, i.e. infrastructures that are repaired, rebuilt, never completed or designed only as a projection surface, and which precisely because of this shape social and ecological orders. The masterclass also discusses whether non-human life itself can be thought of as infrastructure if “infrastructuring” is understood as a practice that opens up possibilities for certain futures. The masterclass concludes with a critical reflection on why the term infrastructure has become so ubiquitous, especially in the context of growth, urbanisation and resource extraction, and how this category can be analytically re-irritated in order to move beyond the “infrastructural turn”.