The Pragmatism in Infrastructure Studies and Its Consequences: Breakdown, Experience, and Epistemic Justice

Raquel Velho, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

A crucial truism of infrastructure studies holds that infrastructures are invisible until they break down. This claim is indebted to both Heideggerian phenomenology and Deweyan thought. But while phenomenology helpfully illuminates the experience of the user, it does less, I argue, to explain the breakdown of the situation — and, crucially, for whom that breakdown occurs and why. American pragmatism offers a parallel and more productive insight: for thinkers like James and Dewey, the possibility of consciousness begins where habit and routine fail. This pragmatist kernel, I argue, is not merely an adjacent tradition to infrastructure studies — it is embedded within it. Susan Leigh Star, one of the field's most cited authors, worked within a tradition directly linked to American pragmatism through her advisor Anselm Strauss, himself shaped by the Chicago School context of Mead and Dewey. My paper proposes to trace that genealogy, arguing that infrastructure studies carries embedded pragmatist commitments that have not been fully examined. Specifically, I focus on visibility and invisibility as constructed in light of experience and ask: whose experience? And how does this better account for infrastructural breakdown and design issues. Ultimately, if design problems are not given but constructed by inquirers based on their situated experience and values, as Dewey argues, then the standard model of infrastructure design — in which engineers and planners define the problem and marginalized communities receive the solution — is not just politically unjust but epistemologically inadequate. Recovering pragmatism in our analyses may therefore offer a better epistemological accounting of the issues of design and, in turn, may offer better pedagogical paths for engineering and design education.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 83. Theoretical Approaches to Structural and Infrastructural Transformation