Afterword. Relations, Refusal, Reticulation

The articles in the special issue 'Infrastructural Lives' draw attention to the 'hidden transcript' of infrastructural practices in distinct urban and rural locations in India and Vietnam, showing technical labour, outright refusal, and improvisation across myriad reticulated con...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe Asia Pacific journal of anthropology Vol. 25; no. 2; pp. 197 - 207
Main Author Coleman, Leo
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Abingdon Routledge 14.03.2024
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Subjects
Anthropology
Hidden transcripts
India
Infrastructure
Marginality
Refusal
Surveillance
Tactics
Vietnam
Vietnam
India
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Summary:The articles in the special issue 'Infrastructural Lives' draw attention to the 'hidden transcript' of infrastructural practices in distinct urban and rural locations in India and Vietnam, showing technical labour, outright refusal, and improvisation across myriad reticulated connections to be elements of an 'infrapolitics' that is practical, responsive, and reckons in various ways with the forces of calculability and control inherent in infrastructural expansion, digital surveillance, and urban redevelopment. The authors explore how roads are policed and navigated, how livelihoods are transformed by new technological systems, and how diverse tactics of negotiation and refusal can be mobilised to sustain lives. These articles demonstrate that tactics of resistance and refusal are elements in a wider infrastructural politics, sometimes 'completing' networked systems and making them 'work' for marginalised populations, sometimes evading or refusing their logic of connection and circulation in preference to other patterns of circulation.
ISSN:1444-2213
1740-9314
DOI:10.1080/14442213.2024.2318247