28:T549,

This article makes two related arguments. First, that the continuum of hazards that people can experience in relation to waste infrastructures can include unstable epistemic and political positionings of olfaction, alongside other impingements of human excrement such as toxicity to the human body and damage to ecologies. I show this by paying attention to how people are sensitized to smell and by paying attention to how diverse forms of scientific measurement have responded to embodied attunements under nonsovereign conditions in Palestine. Second, I argue that olfaction can be key to shaping infrastructures’ specific trajectories while also creating open-ended possibilities for the making of political subjects and futures. In Palestine, olfaction is an object of interpretation, a sensory tool for interpretation, and a shifting marker of belonging to different types of collectivities. Holding one’s real or proverbial nose—or not—contributes to the conditions that facilitate or preempt livability there. This article draws on fieldwork among Palestinian environmentalists, Palestinian Authority bureaucrats, and municipal employees between 2007 and 2017 to show how human bodies—and their interpreted and interpretive attunements—must figure in our investigations of infrastructural spaces in the Middle East and beyond.

29:T528,

This article investigates the infrastructures of dairy farming and artisanal cheesemaking in rural Kars, Northeastern Turkey. Based on my 18-month ethnographic research on dairy farming and dairy sciences of pasture-cheeses of Kars, I conceptualize these dairy infrastructures as the material web of relations, which makes dairy production possible through sociotechnical practices of obtaining milk in pastures and crafting it into cheeses. The national food safety regulations (and its underlying Pasteurian technosciences) prioritize industrial dairy infrastructures at the expense of “unsafe” dairy production in pastures. I focus on an unlikely collaboration between scientists and small dairy farmers in the design and implementation of the Kars Kaşar Cheese geographical indication, which has altered dairy infrastructures in rural Kars in the last 10 years through practices of, what I call, “pasturing.” By analyzing how pastures appear in the milk and cheese, I argue that practices of pasturing the kaşar cheese challenge the industrial dairy infrastructures by prioritizing pasture-milk in the spatial arrangements across pastures and dairies, as well as by calibrating dairy craft and technosciences to sense pastures in the everyday life of dairy farming and cheesemaking.

2a:T522,

Geographers and historians have contributed to a well-established literature on how places become repositories of inherited meanings and contested memories. Much less attention has been afforded to space and place as future-making resources. In this article, we consider how extant places feature in the imagination, planning and development of ex novo cities. Focusing on three new administrative capitals in Southeast Asia – Putrajaya (in Malaysia), Naypyidaw (in Myanmar) and Nusantara (in Indonesia) – we show how places have been mobilized as points of persuasion, or what sociologist Thomas Gieryn has termed “truth spots”. Drawing and building upon Gieryn’s work, we identify three heuristic types of truth spots: aspirational truth spots that demonstrate progressive developmental possibilities for emulation; antithetical truth spots signaling past failures to avoid in planning and developing the future city; and anticipatory truth spots that articulate future expectations, justifying forms of (in)action in the present. While existing work on truth spots emphasizes powers of persuasion associated with physical, in-person experiences of place, our emphasis and contribution centres on the narrative mobilization of place references.

2b:T584,