Call for Publications: Verge 6.2 (Infrastructure)

This special issue [of Verge] will gather new work from the humanities, arts,
and social sciences examining “infrastructure” as concept or material
reality in Asia, Asian America, and Asian diasporic communities around
the world. We welcome scholarship that explores the relationships
between real and conceptual infrastructures, concrete materials and
codes of practice—both in particular parts of Asia and as Asian people,
goods, and ideas circulate globally. We are especially interested in
essays that use the concept of infrastructure to better understand
questions related to development projects, technological changes, and
emergent political and social realities. Our goal is to discover how
infrastructure studies can renew classic approaches to Asian societies
and their national or global histories, provide new insights into Asian
and Asian diasporic literatures or arts, and help focus attention on
current ecological and political concerns—for example, by mobilizing new
concepts such as redundancy, resiliance, and repair. We seek close
examinations of the evolution of the infrastructures that are
fundamental to economic and political relations, and to the daily lives
of billions of people, to reveal the ways in which material
technologies, sociotechnical processes, legal forms, popular culture,
and the natural environment interact to produce the physical and
imagined spaces of city, nation, region, and empire.

Essays (between 6,000-10,000 words) should be prepared according to
the author-date + bibliography format as outlined in section 2.38 of the
University of Minnesota Press style guide, and submitted electronically
to verge@psu.edu.