Dr. Kernaghan
What kinds of communities emerge through the material and figural construction of roads as public works? Which genres of events do such works make possible? And how do roads, and related transit infrastructures, bring to the fore tensions between physical terrains, state governance and political subjectivities? In this class we will weigh the distinctive features and topological traits of roads as they intersect with the dense historicities of specific locales. We will privilege highways and transit mega-projects in the Americas for their profound connections to territorial administration, regimes of property and senses of place, but also to experiences of speed and temporal dislocation. We give especial attention to the apparent power and multiple effects of new roads: how they have reconfigured urban, peri-urban and rural landscapes, impacted indigenous populations, shaped settler ideologies, and bolstered state claims to radical title over frontiers. By asking what binds transit infrastructures to assertions of eminent domain, we will stress the political character of roads and their potential to create charged spaces of encounter—as nodal points of governmentality (checkpoints with their various forms of profiling); as sites for popular contentions and counter-publics (demonstrations, strikes, blockages); or as zones of “everyday insecurity” (crime and traffic accidents). Ultimately, we seek to understand how roads articulate not only distinct sorts of circulations but variable modes of sociality (intimacy, remove, anonymity, etc.) that can often become vibrant worlds in their own right.