Thinking Through Infrastructure Network

Thinking Through Infrastructure Network
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Thinking through infrastructure – energy, transport, water, waste, housing, health – with methods from the arts, humanities, & social sciences. Follow @TTinfraNetwork and learn more here: https://researchcentres.citystgeorges.ac.uk/thinking-through-infrastructure-network#unit=about

  1. 20 Jul

    Privatising Humanity: How Our Essential Human Needs Became Financial Assets, with Kate Bayliss

    Who owns the UK’s most essential infrastructure? How are our water and energy bills connected to offshore finance and private equity? What are the social consequences of privatised infrastructure ownership? And how can we build the political will to implement meaningful alternatives? In this episode, Dom spoke with with Kate Bayliss, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Development Policy and Research at SOAS, University of London, about her powerful new book, Privatising Humanity: How Our Essential Human Needs Became Financial Assets, which was published in 2026 by Manchester University Press. The conversation covered the origins and extent of infrastructure privatisation in the UK, the differences between asset manager capitalism and the asset manager society, the catastrophe of Macquarie’s ownership of Thames Water, and why Universal Basic Infrastructure might be a more enduring solution to inequality than Universal Basic Income. Please like, subscribe, and review the podcast to help us reach more listeners.

    Privatising Humanity: How Our Essential Human Needs Became Financial Assets, with Kate Bayliss

  2. 16 Jun

    Less is Not Enough: Minimalist Desires and Postgrowth Politics, with Miriam Meissner, Dom Davies, and Postgrowth Planning at UCL Bartlett

    From decluttering bedroom drawers to detoxing from social media, minimalism has taken the global affluent class by storm. But what are the cultural politics of minimalist practices? Are they just an online trend or do they foster deeper desires that might be mobilised in the pursuit of a just world after capitalist growthism? And is It possible to speak of Marie Kondo as an organic intellectual of the globally affluent? This episode presents an event hosted by the UCL Bartlett’s Postgrowth Planning Group to celebrate the publication of Miriam Meissner’s new book, Less is Not Enough: Minimalist Desires and Postgrowth Politics. Trends like decluttering and mindfulness depoliticise middle-class frustrations with capitalist exploitation. Through a critical analysis of self-help books, TV shows, and online communities, Less Is Not Enough argues that while minimalism is often a distraction from the root causes of the very problems it seeks to alleviate, it also contains the seeds of a more radical cultural politics that might build popular consent for postgrowth planning strategies. The event was organised and introduced by Dan Durrant, Associate Professor in Infrastructure Planning at the Bartlett School of Planning. Miriam Meissner is Assistant Professor of Culture and Political Ecology at Maastricht University and currently Visiting Professor at the School of Arts and Humanities at the Royal College of Art, London. She was in discussion with Dom Davies, Reader in English at City St George’s, University of London, and convener of the Thinking Through Infrastructure Network. Please take a moment to like, subscribe, and review the podcast to help us reach more listeners.

    Less is Not Enough: Minimalist Desires and Postgrowth Politics, with Miriam Meissner, Dom Davies, and Postgrowth Planning at UCL Bartlett

  3. 2 Jun

    Missiles on the Machair: Military Infrastructures in the Scottish Hebrides, with Zsuzsanna Ihar

    Where is Britain’s military infrastructure? Who builds it and how does it reshape rural landscapes? What happens to the communities who must learn to live in its vicinity? How are they persuaded to accept it? How do they resist? Whose labour makes military infrastructure work and how is it connected to conflicts around the world? In this episode, Dom spoke with Zsuzsanna Ihar, an anti-disciplinary historian and anthropologist, about her research into the roll out of military infrastructure in the Uist, a group of six islands in the outer Hebridean archipelago. The conversation covered the rise of critical military studies, the continuities between the Highland clearances and the later establishment of military infrastructures, the dubious promise of dual use technologies and the recruitment of disadvantaged communities into the military industrial complex, and the ongoing construction of a new space port at Britain’s northernmost edges. The episode features Murchadh MacPhàrlain sung by Margaret Bennett. Pictures from Zsuzsanna’s research are available on the @TTinfraNetwork Instagram page. Please take a moment to like, subscribe, and review the podcast to help us reach more listeners.

    Missiles on the Machair: Military Infrastructures in the Scottish Hebrides, with Zsuzsanna Ihar

  4. 5 May

    Gentrification and African Presence in Peckham Walking Tour, with Charmaine Brown

    This episode presents an audio recording of the Gentrification and African Presence in Peckham or GAPP walking tour, led by Dr Charmaine Brown. The tour highlights key spaces in Peckham occupied by the Caribbean community from the 1950s through to the 1990s and early 2000s. It also explores how Peckham has been reshaped by waves of gentrification in the years since. Photographs from along the route of the tour, including its different stops, are available on the Thinking Through Infrastructure Instagram page, which you can find @TTinfraNetwork. We recommend making use of these visual aids as you listen. Dr Brown is a London-based educator from Kingston, Jamaica. For more information about her work, or if you would like to contact her about leading another tour, please head to www.drcharmainebrown.com. Please like, subscribe, and review the podcast to help us reach more listeners.

    Gentrification and African Presence in Peckham Walking Tour, with Charmaine Brown

  5. 7 Apr

    Electric Wind: An Energy History of Modern Britain, with Marianna Dudley

    What is wind? How do we transform wind into electricity? And how does a view of Britain from the vantage of wind energy change our narrative of its national history and its national geography as well? This episode of the TTiN podcasts presents a recording from a live event hosted in collaboration with SPARC, or Sound Practice and Research at City St George’s, as well as City’s Modern History Cluster. The event featured an exhibition of visual artworks made in collaboration with community energy practitioners as well as an audio experience by SPARC co-director Claudia Molitor and writer Jessica J. Lee, titled “1000 words for weather.” Excerpts from this work feature at throughout this episode. The recording also features a conversation between TTiN convenor Dom Davies and Marianna Dudley, Senior Lecturer in the Environmental Humanities at the University of Bristol, about her recent book Electric Wind: An Energy History of Modern Britain (MUP 2025), which takes readers to Britain's wildest and windiest places to think deeply about the role of nature in politics, culture, science, and technology. This discussion explored the connections between wind energy and the welfare state, what wind has to do with Thatcherite ideology, the cultural politics of NIMBY resistance to wind turbines, and the limits of GB Energy. Pictures from the event are available on the @TTinfraNetwork Instagram page. Please like, subscribe, and review the podcast to help us reach more listeners.

    Electric Wind: An Energy History of Modern Britain, with Marianna Dudley

  6. 10 Mar

    Exhausted Circulation: Palestine and the Politics of Cement, with Samir Harb

    Concrete underpins modern construction and allows for building processes that are mostly taken for granted. But where does the cement that comprises concrete actually come from? What natural resources, state territories, power relations, and political ecologies does cement bring into view? And how are the stakes of these ecologies raised in the fraught space of Palestine, where cement mediates exhaustion and anti-colonial survival against the constrictions of the Israeli occupation? In this episode, Dom spoke with Samir Harb, a trained architect, human geographer, comics maker, and artist to discuss his research into the politics of cement in occupied Palestine. The conversation covered Samir’s early training as an architect in the West Bank, how the circulation of cement exhausts the metabolism of Palestinian cities, why Samir has used comics to explore the territorial contradictions of the Israeli occupation, and why he has turned to art in response to the genocide in Gaza. Pictures to illustrate the conversation are available on the @TTinfraNetwork Instagram page. Please take a moment to like, subscribe, and review the podcast to help us reach more listeners.

    Exhausted Circulation: Palestine and the Politics of Cement, with Samir Harb

  7. 17 Feb

    Logistics and Power: Supply Chains from Slavery to Space, with Susan Zieger

    Logistics describes the just-in-time supply chains that make consumer capitalism possible in the twenty-first century. It has seeped into every corner of our imaginations and behaviours, transforming us into logistical subjects who must manage our lives through the systems and schedules of late modernity. But where does logistics come from? What are its pressure points and paradoxes? And how does it shape our culture and society? In this episode of the Thinking Through Infrastructure podcast, Dom sat down with Susan Zieger, professor of English at the University of California in Riverside, to discuss her latest book, Logistics and Power: Supply Chains from Slavery to Space. The conversation covered just some of the book’s many supply chain stories, which take us from the lettuce in your fridge to the manacles of the Middle Passage, from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to extra-terrestrial networks. Together, these stories show us how logistics blur the lines between peace and war, and how counter-logistics can create more human spaces in a world that is otherwise governed by commodity power. For more info, follow @TTinfraNetwork on Instagram and BlueSky. Please like, subscribe, and review this podcast to help us reach more listeners. We hope you enjoy the conversation.

    Logistics and Power: Supply Chains from Slavery to Space, with Susan Zieger

  8. 26 Jan

    Cartographies of Empire: The Road Novel and American Hegemony, with Myka Tucker-Abramson

    What makes an American road novel? What are the material conditions that caused it to emerge in the mid-twentieth century? Why does it persist, what does it tell us about infrastructure, and why has it travelled so widely – but also unevenly – through literary cultures across the globe? In this episode, Dom sat down with Myka Tucker-Abramson to discuss her recent book, Cartographies of Empire: The Road Novel and American Hegemony (Stanford 2025). Drawing on an archive of more than 140 road novels from over twenty countries, Myka asks what this seemingly straightforward genre can tell us about the hopes, contradictions, and disappointments of infrastructure as it has been scripted in the US and across its informal empire. For more info, follow @TTinfraNetwork on Instagram and BlueSky. Please like, subscribe, and review this podcast to help us reach more listeners. We hope you enjoy the conversation.

    Cartographies of Empire: The Road Novel and American Hegemony, with Myka Tucker-Abramson
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Thinking through infrastructure – energy, transport, water, waste, housing, health – with methods from the arts, humanities, & social sciences. Follow @TTinfraNetwork and learn more here: https://researchcentres.citystgeorges.ac.uk/thinking-through-infrastructure-network#unit=about

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