Experimenting with political materials: environmental infrastructures and ontological transformations

Abstract

Wide-ranging research, in science and technology studies (STS), anthropology, environmental and infrastructural studies, and elsewhere, can currently be seen to work out the implications of Latour's evocative but enigmatic call for a parliament of things. What are the political materials that would inhabit such a parliament? What are their demands? And how are social scientists capable of getting them into view? Asking these questions, the paper experiments with political materials in a double sense. Putting into conversation a heterogeneous corpus of empirical materials, the paper examines some ways in which different forms of materiality impinge on politics, and conceptions thereof. Doing so, it also highlights different ways in which different kinds of scholarly materials are able to get political materials into view. Environmental infrastructures, the paper shows, are excellent objects for thinking through the implications of political materials because of the sheer ontological multiplicity of their constituent components. They are cauldrons in which multiple forms of political materials intermingle and through which practical ontologies emerge. Eliciting these, often invisible, processes, the paper aims to enhance the sensitivity of social scientists to the multiplicity of political materials that shape our worlds.