Dec. 15, 2021
14:30–15:00: Introduction
Jan Hansen (Berlin/Los Angeles) and Frederik Schulze (Cologne): Infrastructures as Material Assemblages
15:00–16:15: Panel 1: Infrastructure and the Making of the „Modern“ City
Vincent Lagendijk (Maastricht): Concrete Racism: Road-Building, Urban Reconstruction and Race Relations in Baltimore, 1910–2018
Laura Meneghello (Siegen): Assembling the City: Pneumatic Tubes and the Social Space
Discussant: Timothy Moss (Berlin)
16:45–18:00: Panel 2: Infrastructure, Empires, and Questions of Power
Alicia Maggard (Auburn): Steam Power and State Power: The United States, New Granada, and the Panama Route
Aaron Hall (Minneapolis): Bad Roads: Slavery and Public Ways in the Antebellum South
Discussant: Ute Hasenöhrl (Innsbruck)
18:30–19:30: Keynote Lecture
Anke Ortlepp (Cologne): Putting Things into Perspective: Reflections on the History of Materials and Materiality
Dec. 16, 2021
10:00–11:15: Panel 3: Material Networks of Circulation
Tiina Männistö-Funk (Turku): What a Curbstone Does: A Century of Material Entanglements in Street Space
Marie Huber (Berlin): The Social Life of Planes: Approaching the Materiality of 20th Century Air Travel through Object Biographies of Passenger Planes
Discussant: Daqing Yang (Washington, D.C.)
11:30–12:45: Panel 4: Roads: One Infrastructure, Different Materials
Maria Luísa Sousa (Lisbon): The Portuguese Intra-Imperial Research on the Use of Laterite in Road Construction in Angola and Mozambique
Martin Meiske (Munich): Toxic Traces of Maintenance and Repair: Exploring the Rise of Creosote and its Precarious Legacy in Europe
Discussant: Julia Obertreis (Erlangen-Nuremberg)
14:15–15:30: Panel 5: Materials between Stability and Fluidity
Gretchen Bakke (Berlin): Refrigerator as Lynchpin: A Short History of the Fossil Fuelled Electricity System
Ellan F. Spero (Cambridge, MA): Sand, Microbes, and Machinery: The Materiality of Potable Water in a Manufacturing City
Discussant: Kenny Cupers (Basel)
16:00–17:45: Panel 6: Invisible Materialities
Jeanne Féaux de la Croix (Tübingen): „Phantom-Infrastructure“: Efficacy and Political Emotions in Planning
Marina Peterson (Austin): Cloud Seeding Los Angeles: The Poetics of Aerial Infrastructure
Daqing Yang (Washington, D.C.): The Materiality and Agency of Void: Wireless Spectrum and the Communications Infrastructure in the Asia Pacific, 1900–1941
Discussant: Gretchen Bakke (Berlin)
18:15–19:30: Keynote Lecture
Kenny Cupers (Basel), Prita Meier (New York), and Zandi Sherman (New Brunswick): Coloniality of Infrastructure
Dec. 17, 2021
9:30–10:45: Panel 7: Concrete as a Medium of Power: Corporate History Perspectives
María Jeldes Olivares and Paul Sprute (both Erkner): Materialities of the Construction Process: International Contractors and the Subway in Buenos Aires
Sadia Amin and Monika Motylinska (both Erkner): (Dis)-Connecting Elements: A Vivisection of Ebute-Ero in Lagos
Discussant: Vincent Lagendijk (Maastricht)
11:00–12:30: Round Table
Kenny Cupers (Basel), Ute Hasenöhrl (Innsbruck), Timothy Moss (Berlin)
(All times local)