Abstract
After more than a decade of rising popularity of infrastructure studies, the time seems ripe to take a closer look at how infrastructures have been studied ethnographically. Ethnography and ethnographic fieldwork have been utilized throughout the social sciences and humanities to explore infrastructure as a multi-scalar phenomenon – rooted in the local and extending to transnational and global levels. In doing so, ethnographic studies of infrastructure have focused on visible and invisible elements of infrastructure, on their material and non-material (affective, ideological, and social) dimensions, their geopolitical and economic implications, and on their relationality and embeddedness into other structures. Ethnographies of infrastructure allow for grasping the diversity of perceptions, entanglements, practices, and processes connected with the planning, building, using, and repairing of infrastructure. This special issue calls for papers that explore theoretical perspectives and offer methodological treatments of infrastructure and are grounded in empirical case studies or/and critical reviews of existing ethnographies of infrastructure. Thus, this issue aims at exploring the potential benefits of ethnographic research for infrastructure studies, and at the same time poses the question what social science studies of infrastructure can contribute to a broader understanding of ethnography. This CFP will be open for submissions until September 1, 2024