Civic Matter: Infrastructure as Politic [2013-2015]

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2014-15  Civic Matter: Infrastructure in Sense and Resonance

This Faculty Research Group builds on the existing Civic Matter programme on the social, ethical and political work of infrastructure. The programme to date has focused on infrastructural design, (re)construction and maintenance, and on 'matter' as locus of staggered, juxtaposed and disjointed temporalities of the civic. Moving out from considerations of civic matter in respect of its spatio-temporal extension, this series proposes to examine the 'matter' of civic life (built, landscaped, public, aesthetic) as sensory, embodied, and resonant, in terms of the articulation of materiality with civic affect and sociability. In this formulation, civic matter is alternately fugitive and invasive, elusive and intrusive, as much personal as mediated and social, constituted precisely of what eludes systematic social scientific research and of what emerges in the nexus of affect and performance.

As such, civic matter is attractive, amenable, subject to, and constitutive of a range of novel performance and research interventions and enterprises across the arts, humanities and social sciences. The proposed Faculty Research Group aims to articulate and consolidate converging methodological interests among organisers, speakers, and audiences at CRASSH in the materiality, context, violence, play and inequity emergent in the experiential dimensions of the civic and infrastructural, our subject matter in the 2013-14 series. This programme seeks to bring together thinkers from geography and urban planning, environmental history, art practice and performance, the anthropology of movement, and sonic arts and ethnomusicology to discern and interrogate the resonances and sensory life of civic matter, as it networks amid, constitutes and exceeds the infrastructural with which we have been hitherto concerned.