A Nonhumanist Disposition // Casper Bruun Jensen

Infrastructures and Social Complexity – A Companion, edited by Penny Harvey, Casper Bruun Jensen and Atsuro Morita is published by Routledge in October 2016. See the table of contents.

.

Contemporary forms of infrastructural development herald alternative futures through their incorporation of digital technologies, mobile capital, international politics and the promises and fears of enhanced connectivity. In tandem with increasing concerns about climate change and the anthropocene, there is further an urgency around contemporary infrastructural provision: a concern about its fragility, and an awareness that these connective, relational systems significantly shape both local and planetary futures in ways that we need to understand more clearly. Offering a rich set of empirically detailed and conceptually sophisticated studies of infrastructural systems and experiments, present and past, contributors to this volume address both the transformative potential of infrastructural systems and their stasis. Covering infrastructural figures; their ontologies, epistemologies, classifications and politics, and spanning development, urban, energy, environmental and information infrastructures, the chapters explore both the promises and failures of infrastructure. Tracing the experimental histories of a wide range of infrastructures and documenting their variable outcomes, the volume offers a unique set of analytical perspectives on contemporary infrastructural complications. These studies bring a systematic empirical and analytical attention to human worlds as they intersect with more-than-human worlds, whether technological or biological.

The monograph Monitoring Movements in Development Aid: Recursive Partnerships and Aid Infrastructures, co-written with Brit Ross Winthereik, now available from MIT Press.

“Monitoring Movements in Development Aid is the first book to examine what development aid is becoming in the information age. What the authors find is surprising: novel partnerships and intertwined agendas, the critic’s and the aid professional’s; inventive frontiers of ethical practice and fraught politics where the very form of infrastructure constitutes new social and technical milieus. With increasing calls for accountability in aid projects, and metrics for assessing the effectiveness of aid interventions, the authors’ project could not be more timely” – Bill Maurer, Professor of Anthropology and Law, University of California, Irvine

“Anyone who implements or evaluates global socio-material infrastructures meant to enable the flow of aid-related information that help to create transparency, strengthen partnerships, and improve accountability should read this book. It offers a sharp and forgiving account of what concerns you” – Annemarie Mol, Professor of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam

“Conceptualizing development aid within an information infrastructure perspective provides compelling insights into why such programs have less than optimal results, and why there is a mismatch between what is promised and the reality on the ground. Such an infrastructure is both a solution and a source of problems, as it is always incomplete and in the making” – Sundeep Sahay, University of Oslo.

Read a review from the LSE Review of Books here.

“Casper Bruun Jensen is one of the most intellectually accomplished and creative theorists of second-generation Science and Technology Studies (STS) as well as one of the most active and productive researchers in the field. In Ontologies for Developing Things, he offers a series of highly original delineations and vigorous defenses of recent developments–or, as he calls them “dispositions”–in STS (ontological, performative, pragmatist, and so forth) through a series of parallel narrations of his own onsite studies of the introduction of new medical-information technologies in Denmark and Canada. Ontologies for Developing Things is a work of unflagging intelligence and intellectual energy, spilling over with new ideas, surprising angles, sharp perceptions and interesting juxtapositions, and written with correspondingly attractive punch and force. Readers interested in information technologies, contemporary developments in social studies of science, and related cultural and political theory will find the book immensely engaging and endlessly useful”

Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Duke University and Brown University [author of Scandalous Knowledge: Science Truth and the Human and Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion]

“This superb book is all of empirically rich, politically engaged, ontologically profound and lucid. Any three of the four makes a very good book; all four makes an outstanding one”.

Geoffrey C. Bowker, UC Irvine [author of Science on the Run, Memory Practices in the Sciences and Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences with Susan Leigh Star]

See the review in Intersections here.