Infrastructures and practices: connections, disjunctions and dynamics
Elizabeth Shove
Professor of Sociology
Department of Sociology
Lancaster University

This speculative talk explores a series of questions arising from an interest in the relationship between infrastructures and complexes of social practice. In thinking about how infrastructures-and-practices change over time, how they interact in specific locations and circulate between them, and how forms of interdependence take hold I am interested in thinking about processes that are important in social theories of practice but not yet firmly on the agenda in science and technology studies. These include forms of ‘layering’, ‘obduracy’, ‘anchoring’, ‘de-tethering’ and ‘interweaving’ and ‘hybridisation’. I will make use of a collection of different examples – road infrastructures, digital networks, office buildings, power cuts and home IT – in support of an exercise in interdisciplinary agenda setting.