Table Of ContentInfrastructural Being
Rethinking dwelling in a
naturecultural world
Edited by
Jarno Valkonen · Veera Kinnunen ·
Heikki Huilaja · Teemu Loikkanen
Infrastructural Being
· ·
Jarno Valkonen Veera Kinnunen
·
Heikki Huilaja Teemu Loikkanen
Editors
Infrastructural Being
Rethinking dwelling in a naturecultural world
Editors
Jarno Valkonen Veera Kinnunen
Faculty of Social Sciences Faculty of Humanities
University of Lapland University of Oulu
Rovaniemi, Finland Oulu, Finland
Heikki Huilaja Teemu Loikkanen
Faculty of Social Sciences Faculty of Social Sciences
University of Lapland University of Lapland
Rovaniemi, Finland Rovaniemi, Finland
ISBN 978-3-031-15826-1 ISBN 978-3-031-15827-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15827-8
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Preface
This volume springs from our interest in waste and waste relations in
a contemporary world. We have spent the previous four years literally
and metaphorically “in the bin,” following how different heterogeneous
materials are enacted waste, and how the status and value of waste are
being negotiated both in policy making and in the everyday practices of
households. Our research project The Waste Society: Living with material
overflows addressed waste as a co-constitutive part of society by seeking
to explore how society shapes waste—and how waste, in turn, shapes society.
Waste has been good to think with—given that it is a central matter of
concern in the ongoing attempts to strive for a more sustainable world.
However, when dealing with the mucky reality of living with waste, we
became more and more aware of the obscure power of infrastructures to
shape the “wasteness” of materials and condition how they are handled
and lived with. Moreover, we observed how the pressure of “Green tran-
sition” and the ongoing process of transforming infrastructures affected
every aspect of everyday life. We understood that if we want to contribute
to understanding—and possibly even transforming—the world, we have
to include infrastructures into our inquiry. It is no wonder, then, that
scholars with a wide range of backgrounds are increasingly seeking to
develop infrastructural imagination.
Therefore, instead of focusing solely on waste, we wanted to gather a
collection of texts that would address the diverse and ubiquitous nature
of infrastructures conditioning our everyday lives. We invited a bunch
v
vi PREFACE
of authors whose writings have inspired us to think about infrastructural
being. Instead of providing a strictly defined concept for the contributors
to work with, we hoped that our contributors would treat infrastructural
being as an open invitation to explore how are infrastructures rather than
what are infrastructures. Drawing from very different cases and scholarly
traditions, this volume gives eight different interpretations. Thank you for
accepting our invitation!
As we all know, academic work is made possible by a vast infrastruc-
ture of actors. We wish to make some of them visible by acknowledging
them here: First of all, we wish to thank Academy of Finland for financing
our research with two generous grants (Waste Society. Living with mate-
rial overflows 317914 and Envisioning Proximity tourism with New
Materialism 324493). In addition, we thank University of Lapland for
providing infrastructural and organizational support for in-depth research
on phenomena that we find intriguing. This is something that cannot
be taken for granted in today’s neoliberal academic climate. Our heart-
felt thanks goes especially to the language editing specialist of University
of Lapland, Sari Kokkola, not only for excellent proof reading but also
for providing insightful suggestions that helped us to sharpen our chap-
ters. We also wish to thank Birgitta Vinkka for helpful comments at every
stage of the editing process; the Waste Society research group wouldn’t
be the same without your witty humor! We would also like to thank the
students at the University of Lapland and the growing academic commu-
nity of social scientific waste researchers for all the inspiring discussions,
feedback and collaboration in a variety of seminars, lectures, conferences,
and texts.
We also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for providing valuable
insights which helped us to fine-tune the focus of the book. We greatly
appreciate your generous input! And last but not least, our publisher
Palgrave MacMillan is to be thanked for believing in this project. Rachel
Ballard at Palgrave and Aishwarya Balachandar at Springer, we are grateful
for tending to the book throughout the editing and publishing process.
Rovaniemi, Finland Jarno Valkonen
Veera Kinnunen
Heikki Huilaja
Teemu Loikkanen
Contents
Part I Opening Wor(l)ds
1 Introduction 3
Jarno Valkonen, Veera Kinnunen, Heikki Huilaja,
and Teemu Loikkanen
2 Approaching Infrastructural Being 17
Veera Kinnunen and Jarno Valkonen
Part II Future-Making
3 Anticipatory Infrastructures, Emerging Technologies
and Visions of Energy Futures 33
Sarah Pink, Kari Dahlgren, Yolande Strengers,
and Larissa Nicholls
4 Assembling Wild Nature: Icelandic Wildness
as a Natureculture Meshwork 61
Phillip Vannini and April Vannini
Part III Naturecultural Citizenship
5 The Social Class and Lifestyle Embeddedness of Being
Within Energy Infrastructures 87
William Lytle, Chelsea Schelly, Holly Caggiano,
and Kristin Floress
vii
viii CONTENTS
6 Circular Economy as Infrastructural Change: Waste
Citizenship in the Bin 115
Teemu Loikkanen, Jarno Valkonen, and Heikki Huilaja
Part IV Care and Compassion
7 From Waste Management to Waste Care 147
Veera Kinnunen and Melisa Duque
8 The Biosphere and the Garden: Nature
as Infrastructure? 171
Yrjö Haila
Part V Afterwor(l)ds
9 Afterword: Some Unintentional Consequences
of Infrastructure 199
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Index 209
Notes on Contributors
Caggiano Holly, Ph.D. is a Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow at
Princeton University’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environ-
ment. Drawing on an interdisciplinary social science background, her
work explores how new arrangements of institutions, coalitions, and
policy frameworks can enable rapid and equitable decarbonization.
Dahlgren Kari is a Research Fellow in the Emerging Technologies
Research Lab, at Monash University. She is a social anthropologist and
ethnographer interested in the social and ethical aspects of energy produc-
tion and consumption in Australia. Her work is situated at the intersection
of economic and environmental anthropology, with a particular interest in
the anthropology of energy, climate change, and transition. She holds a
Ph.D. from the London School of Economics, an M.Sc. from Oxford
University and a B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill.
Duque Melisa is a Research Fellow of the Emerging Technologies
Research Lab. She is a full-time member based in the Department of
Design MADA, Monash University. As a design researcher, her works
sit at the intersection of Design Anthropology, Participatory Design, and
Everyday Design.
Eriksen Thomas Hylland is a Professor of Social Anthropology at
the University of Oslo, Norway, and an External Scientific Member of
the Max Planck Society. His current research is motivated by a triple
concern: to understand the present world, to understand what it means
ix
x NOTESONCONTRIBUTORS
to be human, and to help bring about social and environmental change.
Among his most recent publications are Overheating. An Anthropology
of Accelerated Change (Pluto Press, 2016), Identity Destabilised: Living
in an Overheated World (edited with Elisabeth Schober, Pluto Press,
2016), Boomtown: Runaway Globalisation on the Queensland Coast and
Knowing from the Indigenous North (edited with Sanna Valkonen & Jarno
Valkonen, Routledge, 2019).
Floress Kristin is a Research Social Scientist with the USDA Forest
Service Northern Research Station. She studies resource conservation
engagement across multiple scales and levels.
Haila Yrjö is an Emeritus Professor of Environmental Policy at Tampere
University, Finland. He was educated as an ecologist, with theoret-
ical philosophy as his secondary subject; his main research interests
have centered on the nature–society interface and eco-social dynamics,
from several complementary perspectives. His major research publica-
tions include Humanity and Nature, Ecology, Science and Society, together
with Richard Levins (Pluto Press, 1992), and How Nature Speaks. The
Dynamics of the Human Ecological Condition, co-edited with Chuck Dyke
(Duke University Press, 2006), as well as several books in Finnish.
Huilaja Heikki, Ph.D. works as a Senior Lecturer of Sociology at the
University of Lapland, Finland. His research focuses on the changes in the
work and working life and on the negotiated nature of the skills and qual-
ifications needed in work and recruitment. In the waste studies, he has
examined Circular Economy in the complex context of institutional waste
management and private or public-private waste businesses and services.
Kinnunen Veera, Ph.D. is a sociologist and a cultural historian working
on a threshold of more-than-human sociology, environmental human-
ities, and feminist ethics. Throughout her research projects, she has
been developing and experimenting with more-than-human ethnographic
methodology. She has published on issues such as everyday relations
with “stuff,” and dwelling with unruly more-than-human others such as
microbes and waste. She holds a position of a Senior Lecturer of Soci-
ology at the University of Lapland, Finland. She is also currently working
as a Postdoctoral Researcher in Envisioning Proximity tourism with New
Materialism (Academy of Finland, 324493).
