We will be joined on the 19th of May for a lecture from Prof. Dr. Gabriele Schabacher, professor of Media and Cultural studies at the University of Mainz. The lecture is an open event from 18.30-19.30 at KGA-205.
You can also join via Zoom: https://kuei.zoom.us/j/64726594064?pwd=N2dXN0FsSjBqSzU2Vy9sR2RVV043Zz09
Meeting ID: 647 2659 4064
Passcode: 351201
‘Mediating Infrastructures. On the Materiality and Temporality of Socio-Technical Networks’
Infrastructures are regarded as the backbone of modern societies. They represent the state’s provision of public services and are a sign of increasing economic interdependence in the context of international trade relations. They circulate goods, people, animals, but also energy, water, waste and information, thus organizing the spatial and temporal transfer of a wide variety of entities. It is this performance of infrastructural systems that constitutes their medial quality. But what exactly does this quality consist of? From a media and cultural studies perspective, the talk explores the materiality and temporality of infrastructures and proposes three perspectives that are relevant for their mediality: the in/visibility of infrastructures, the scalings they accomplish between the global and the local, and their processuality.
Prof. Schabacher will then be leading an internal workshop on Friday the 20th of May, in Marktplatz 2, with open to fellows, faculty, and associated members.
Gabriele Schabacher is professor of media cultural studies at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and co-speaker of the Collaborative Research Center 1482 “Humandifferenzierung.” Her research focuses on media and cultural theory, media history of transport, mobility and infrastructures, cultural techniques of repair, digital regimes of surveillance, media history of seriality and theory of autobiography. Her recent publications include the volumes she co-edited on the cultures of repair (2018) and on the practices of workarounds (2017), and the articles “Time and Technology. The Temporalities of Care” (2021), and “Staged Wrecks. The Railroad Accident between Infrastructural Lessons and Amusement” (2019). Her new book on infrastructures, entitled Infrastruktur-Arbeit, will be published in June 2022.