Call for Papers: Abstracts due Friday 30 January 2026.
lenore.manderson@wits.ac.za and slr@sun.ac.za
Throughout South Africa and across the continent, everyday life is recurrently interrupted by crumbling infrastructure. Water shortages, water rations, power outages, and scheduled load-shedding are endemic. Country-wide, bottled water has increased for drinking and cooking where municipal supplies of water are considered untrustworthy or are simply unavailable, and river water is polluted with industrial toxins and household and animal waste. People with sufficient resources opt for solar panels and alternative sources of energy as electricity supplies are routinely interrupted due to ‘tender irregularities’ and corruption, aging cables, lines and substations, and overuse because systems have not been upgraded to accommodate the needs of an expanding population with far more electrical appliances and tools than ever before. Such ‘private infrastructures’ may provide solutions for those who live in affluent neighbourhoods and gated communities, which are often located alongside places where local state infrastructural collapse has exacerbated poverty and marginalisation. What this suggests is that infrastructural breakdown can result in the co-existence of both marginalisation and concentrations of wealth and power that can, under certain circumstances, lead to insurgent-citizenship activism.
Beyond the national highways, in urban and rural areas, roads are peppered with potholes. These patent examples of infrastructural collapse – of fracture, disrupture and disrepair — are arguably the most visible signs of inequality, within countries and between countries and economies. Attention to infrastructure helps us interrogate how transport, mobility, income, electricity, and time converge to support or unsettle everyday life. The expanded use of infrastructure as a way of theorising these systems, and systems of systems, draws attention to what is necessary, produced by, and underpins social and economic life.
But in unravelling different kinds of interconnections, where we start, and what choices we make analytically, depend on the questions we want to ask in the first place. How do we, as anthropologists, situate this visible decay and the political tensions it invokes while extending this conversation to account for the human and other-than-human entities, forces, relationships and values that create, sustain, and undo networks and structures. Infrastructures depend on other infrastructures. In anthropology, STS and other fields, understanding systems of interconnection – from the biological to the infrastructural – highlight that infrastructures are multiple, interconnecting, expanding, crumbling and mutating.
Pauline Destrée (2021: 93) writes of infrastructure as “the systems of connection undergirding and mediating social life” – in other words, as illustrating how entanglements work. Anthropologists have always studied infrastructures (though not always by this term) as the outcome of social processes, and considered how infrastructures facilitate social processes and social relations. Anthropology’s interest in infrastructure has partly emerged via acknowledgement that contemporary/globalized life is shaped particularly by communication and information infrastructures, but also by transport and related infrastructures of mobility, the affordances that these provide, and the uneven capacity at country and local levels to ensure their smooth working. The focus on infrastructure draws attention to anthropology’s concern with the material conditions of everyday life and its governance, and in mapping the systems that constitute societies. We ask whether a focus on infrastructure allows us to revitalize our attention to how societies work. At the same time, by acknowledging the fragility of infrastructure and structure in resource poor settings, we see here space for questioning the state and its responsibility to citizens (and others), and for innovation and for creativity.
Anthropology’s role is (in part) to unpick the intersections and entanglements that shape the circumstances in which people live, and explain how people live, with whom, and that constitute society and social ecologies, andhow a given ecology (local or global) is produced and maintained. Different ecologies can and do intersect — war and economies are tightly entangled, for instance; the infrastructures of war and economics ask for an analysis of the social systems and structures, software and hardware, ideologies and histories, and persons involved to maintain these particular ecologies. We use infrastructure as an analytic to unpack these ecologies, and to define not only connecting and distributional hardware, but also the processes, ideologies, social systems, and, following Abdoumaliq Simone (2004; 2023), people. Infrastructure has been defined variously, but it includescomponents which contribute to or enable collectivities or states, or enable particular kinds of collectivities and states. Roads, rubbish collection and sanitation systems, water and electricity, are simple examples of this, although how this is conceived varies. A road is the infrastructure that connects points on a landscape, but it is also the infrastructure that enables other things: the exchange of goods, services, and people; the movement of transport to this end; the extension of power and government; or the delivery of other infrastructures, for instance. Thus infrastructure is not only matter than enables the movement of other matter (like a road or a telecommunications network; Larkin 2013), but also, that enables and is inherent to particular forms of social life.
We invite submissions for articles to contribute to a special issue entitled Infrastructure as Matter and Theory, in a journal focusing on Africa – to be confirmed in January 2026. We invite people to submit abstracts of maximum 200 words by 30 January 2026 of articles for inclusion in the special issue. It would help us if you could email us to let us know if you are interest prior to submitting the abstract, so we can plan and anticipateyour submission. We anticipate selecting articles that engage with diverse ethnographic examples and theoretic engagement with infrastructure. Following selection, we aim to will meet face-to-face for a workshop, and tocontinue as a reading group to work our way through the literature on infrastructure.
LENORE MANDERSON is Distinguished Professor of Public Health and Medical Anthropology in the School of Public Health, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa, and an NRF A1 rated scientist. She has worked extensively in Australia, across Asia, and most recently in African settings on health, inequality and social exclusion, and increasingly on art interventions and the social implications of climate change. She has authored or edited 30 books and authored or co-authored over 700 articles, book chapters and reports. She edited the journal Medical Anthropology from 2010-2020, and from 2023, the Human Organization. She also edits the Rutgers University Press series Medical Anthropology. ORCID: 0000-0002-7883-1790.
STEVEN ROBINS is the National Research Foundation (NRF-SARChI) Project Leader in the Sociology & Anthropology of Land, Environment and Sustainable Development Research Programme at Stellenbosch University. He has published on a wide range of topics, including the politics of land, housing and water and sanitation infrastructure; issues of memory and identity and the Truth & Reconciliation Commission (TRC); and questions of citizenship and governance after apartheid. His monographs include “From Revolution to Rights in South Africa: Social Movements and Popular Politics” (2008) and “Letters of Stone: From Nazi Germany to South Africa”/Briefe Aus Stein: Von Nazi-Deutchland Nach Sud Africa (Penguin Random House, 2016; Metropol, 2019).
References
Barlow, Matt and Georgina Drew. 2020. Slow Infrastructures in Times of Crisis: Unworking Speed and Convenience. Postcolonial Studies 24(2): 212-233. https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2020.1804105
Destrée, Pauline. 2021. Contentious Connections: Infrastructure, Dignity, and Collective Life in Accra, Ghana. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 28: 92-113.
Hughes, Lotte and Daniel Rogei. 2020. Feeling the heat: responses to Geothermal Development in Kenya’s Rift Valley. Journal of Eastern African Studies 14(2): 165-184. https://doi.org/10.1080/17531055.2020.1716292
Knox, Hannah, and Evelina Gambino. 2023. “Infrastructure”. In The Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology, edited by Felix Stein. http://doi.org/10.29164/23infrastructure
Larkin, Brian. 2013. The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure. Annual Review of Anthropology 42:327-343. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-092412-155522.
Rippa, Alessandro. 2023. Infrastructure and the Environment in Anthropology. Social Science Information 63(1): 25 –46.
Scaramelli. Caterina. 2019. The Delta Is Dead: Moral Ecologies of Infrastructure in Turkey. Cultural Anthropology 34 (3): 388–416.
Simone, Abdoumaliq. 2004. People as Infrastructure: Intersecting fragments in Johannesburg. Public Culture 16(3): 407-429. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-16-3-407
Simone, Abdoumaliq. 2023. Ritornello: “People as Infrastructure.” Urban Geography 42(9): 1341-1348. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2021.189439