Beyond Reliable Infrastructure

Description

Peter’s present project follows examples of science, technology and medicine beyond reliable infrastructure. He is particularly interested in emerging forms of humanitarian design, and a varied array of efforts to produce innovative fixes and solutions in a box (examples range from nonprofit pharmaceutical production to minimalist life technologies related to food, shelter, water and sanitation). The goal is to consider the complicated ethics and politics of interventions that seek to do good by saving lives, particularly as they relate to past utopian projects of social welfare and justice. In addition to publishing a series of shorter pieces, he spent 2016-17 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, working on the conceptual frame. He is also pursuing an overlapping research on the material politics of sanitation and water in South Africa with Steven Robins at Stellenbosch University.

Key publication

Redfield, Peter and Steven Robins (2016) "An Index of Waste: Humanitarian Design, ‘Dignified Living’ and the Politics of Infrastructure in Cape Town." in Anthropology of Southern Africa 39 (2): 145-162.

Redfield, Peter (2015) "Fluid Technologies: The Bush Pump, the LifeStraw® and Microworlds of Humanitarian Design." in Social Studies of Science 46 (2): 159–183.

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ABOUT THE LOST RESEARCH NETWORK

The acronym LOST stands for Law, Organization, Science and Technology. Anthropology of Law (L), Organization Studies (O), and Science and Technology Studies (ST) are three vibrant transdisciplinary fields. Working at their intersections and merging their approaches, we also emphasize the economic, political, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions of fact-making in the present. The ambition of our detailed ethnographies is to respond to long-standing questions raised in social theory and philosophy, and vice versa, to translate these questions into ethnographic inquiry with a particular focus on critique. We address questions of global and planetary scope, although several of our empirical projects are located in Africa. Since its founding in 2002, LOST has grown from a small group based in Halle, Germany, to a decentralized network of independent scholars in many countries. Its vibrant activities have been winding down for a few years so that during 2024 this website is being turned into an archive.