Infrastructure Humanities and Infrastructural Text Studies

Drawing on recent developments in the humanities that have foregrounded infrastructure’s critical significance in people’s biological and social lives today, this article advances a new research field of “infrastructure humanities” as a cross-disciplinary research on world-(re)making based on the complex dispositions and conceptual potentials of infrastructure. Chapter 2 provides a comprehensive overview of the theoretical underpinnings of this research by outlining four key dimensions of infrastructure: spatial, temporal, aesthetic, and fictional. Based on this theoretical underpinnings, infrastructure humanities seeks to facilitate cross-disciplinary research and a dynamic understanding of world-(re)making processes. Chapter 3 introduces “infrastructure text studies” as a methodology for practicing “infrastructure humanities,” which position texts as a medium for the research. The following methodological trajectories are hereby proposed: infrastructural narrative studies, which examines narrative representations of infrastructure; infrastructural affect studies, which explores affective encounters between humans and infrastructures; and text-infrastructure cultural politics, which analyzes how texts as infrastructural practices intervene in socio-political configurations of real-world. This article, thus, seeks to be an infrastructure for an emerging and promising crossdisciplinary research of “infrastructure humanities.”