CFP: Victorian Infrastructures and their Environmental Legacies
Posted by Dr Paula Clemente Vega on 3 April 2025
CFP for a Special Collection at OLHJ (Open Library of the Humanities Journal)
Victorian Infrastructures and their Environmental Legacies
Edited by Julia Ditter and Irmtraud Huber
Infrastructures have recently drawn critical interest from anthropology, geography, science and technology studies, engineering and humanities scholars interested in the literary, historical, and cultural life of infrastructures. In these new contexts, infrastructures are no longer understood simply as material structures such as railways or telegraph lines, but are instead considered as “dense social, material, aesthetic, and political formations” (Appel, Anand and Gupta, 2018, 3). As critical locations for negotiating the social and political foundation of societies, infrastructures form the “support systems of human sociality” and are shaped not just by brick and cement but by “public imaginaries, social practices, and historical transformations” (Pinnix et.al. 2023, 12). As such, infrastructures ossify historical conditions and carry them into the future. They are material legacies of past worldviews and social organisation which may accommodate but also resist transformation.
The nineteenth century experienced an unprecedented growth of infrastructures that continue to shape our present. Technological advances in energy production, industrialisation, expansion and extractivism enabled the development of new large-scale projects such as the construction of public transport systems, telegraphy, canalisation, the installation of gas and water supply lines and finally the establishment of an electric grid. These are networked systems which are sustained through material construction and social practice, and they are both informed by and in turn shape cultural imaginaries, while at the same time providing the conditions for cultural production. Far from being relics of the past, the infrastructures built throughout the nineteenth century continue to shape the present “in uneven yet persistent ways” (Kirkby 2023). The legacy of this large-scale infrastructural transformation needs to be interrogated as we strive to shape a more sustainable future.
Our special issue aims to approach this legacy in a firmly strategic presentist mode. We invite contributors to interrogate how infrastructures of the past condition our sense of political, social and ecological possibility in the present. Do they enable or hinder the potential for ecological and energetic transformations in the Anthropocene? Which alternative organisations of reality were aborted in the building of nineteenth-century infrastructures? What futurities do they make possible, and which futures do they foreclose? Literary works, historical documents and cultural texts open up spaces for examining such questions. They register and perform the cultural entanglements of infrastructures and imagine alternatives to, or futurities of, nineteenth-century infrastructural projects. Revisiting the infrastructural legacies of the nineteenth century and the paths they laid down is central to gaining a better understanding of the multivalent effects of infrastructures – socially, environmentally, culturally – and envisioning alternative pathways toward a sustainable planetary future.
As “sites of conceptual trouble that refuse the easy separation of the human and the material,” (Appel, Anand and Gupta 2018, 26) infrastructures challenge disciplinary boundaries. By inviting contributions across the humanities, this special issue aims to foster interdisciplinary dialogue. We welcome contributions from literary studies, cultural studies, media history and related disciplines that address, among other topics, the following questions:
- Which material, social and cultural conditions underlie the emergence of new infrastructures, and how are they reflected in the cultural imaginary?
- Which underlying structures of thought or feeling condition the emergence or transformation of infrastructure and what role does cultural production play in shaping them or giving them expression?
- What are the infrastructural conditions for cultural production, and how is the later shaped by them?
- What are the temporalities involved in the maintenance, ruination and transformation of infrastructures and how could they be leveraged to sustainable ends?
- What alternative infrastructures have been imagined or tried out, and what is their resonance for the present?
- Which futures did nineteenth-century infrastructures promise? How do these promises compare to today’s realities?
- How can the entanglement of material and cultural conditions in the emergence of infrastructures be effectively theorised?
Please send abstracts of up to 500 words as well as a short bionote to julia.ditter@uni-konstanz.de and irmtraud.huber@uni-konstanz.de by 31 October 2025. Full articles (8,000 words) will be due by 31 March 2026. All articles will be subject to a double-anonymous peer-review process.
References
Appel, Hannah, Nikhil Anand and Akhil Gupta. 2018. “Temporality, Politics, and the Promise of Infrastructure.” In The Promise of Infrastructure, edited by Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta and Hannah Appel, 1–38. Durham: Duke University Press.
Kirkby, Nicola. 2023. “Nineteenth Century Infrastructures before ‘Infrastructure’.” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 35.
Pinnix, Aaron, Axel Volmar, Fernando Esposito and Nora Binder, eds. 2023. Rethinking Infrastructure Across the Humanities. transcript.