Infrastructuring text:
This paper demonstrates how community support is often quintessential for populations experiencing routine disruptions to be resilient (e.g. LGBTQ individuals who created community over online forums). This community support is also essential for people in Philadelphia experiencing energy vulnerability during COVID-19. People who faced energy service disruptions such as having heating systems that stopped working, knew someone in their community who could come out and look at it as opposed to calling an unknown HVAC company. The elderly relied on community members/community organizations to help them stay connected during COVID. Community organizations offered Zoom tutorials, and community orgs bought prepaid cell phones for vulnerable community members. Additionally, NEC staff reached out to clients, especially vulnerable and elderly clients, to ensure that they were connected to resources during the pandemic.
The fourth principle of infrastructuring practices that generated resilience is that it creates alternative pathways through people to manage disruptions. “People were building alternative infrastructures through which they and others could more successfully adapt to their disruptions. Beyond being able to adapt and manage their disruptions, we find that infrastructuring also led to innovations that may not have been possible otherwise” An example of this seen with our research is Hunting Park’s GofundMe for air conditioning units and fans for people dealing with extreme heat this summer. This use of information and communication technologies served as counter infrastructure for failing assistance programs/physical home infrastructure that is insufficient. Another example is the usage of space heaters when individuals experienced disruptions to their home heating system. They created an alternative technical infrastructure when their normative home infrastructure failed them.
Technology isn’t always accessible/easily usable for those experiencing energy vulnerability, so technology can’t always be a means of resilience. If technical infrastructures themselves (access to sustainable internet, having electricity in one’s home) is the infrastructure that is failing folks, it cannot be a means of resilience. Additionally because of utility inaffordability, the usage of technology as a means of resilience may further burden energy vulnerable households.
Maintenance text:
“The Restart Project has a slightly different ethos. This U.K.- based organization hosts parties and a podcast and collaborates with schools to teach people how to repair their devices. In a similar vein, some public libraries in the U.S. have opened “U-Fix-It” clinics and “repair cafes,” which are a natural extension of the recent proliferation of library makerspaces.” → These resources which embrace “salvage” and the possibilities of adaptation mirror energy conservation workshops where maintenance of home heating systems is mildly touched on, but could be expanded into an entire workshop of its own. The difference lies between the essentiality and mobility of the technologies being repaired- home heating systems may be deemed more essential than a television, and cannot be taken physically to a shop to be repaired.
“We can perform various actions on broken objects — “mending, repairing, fixing, restoring, preserving, cleaning, recycling, up-keeping, and so on” — yet these objects, much like architectures, vary in their “openness and capacity to be taken care of.” → home heating systems often lack the openness and capacity for homeowners to take care of them.
Slow emergencies text:
This text argues that governing through emergencies seeks to reconsolidate and restore the liberal order after disruption. Many policies put forth by the federal government during the emergency declaration during COVID-19 exemplify this, as one-time stimulus payments were made to maintain social order and restore the liberal status quo. More specifically relating to energy, energy assistance programs were not rethought as crisis ensued and more households were in need of energy assistance, and larger sums were necessary for households to avoid energy emergencies, but rather more funding was placed in preexisting pools for energy assistance to again restore the liberal status quo.
Infrastructuring text:
COVID-19 led to people utilizing information systems such as zoom or facebook to learn about and receive energy assistance. Low income and elderly households were outside of the normative logics for information systems and energy systems as a whole and were unable to access these resources. How did these populations build resilience or how didn’t they?
Infrastructuring text:
"Moreover, as demonstrated by Feldman [18] when looking at the use of resources from an organizational perspective, as people’s practices change, so do the ways in which they use resources. To this effect, the use of resources, such as materials and information, is contextual, their meaning and use changes depending on the situation." → Ovens become heaters when people face routine disruptions after losing heat. NEC offices, where an individual may only go to for foodstamps or food pantries, or for other social services, may become an energy office to them when they are facing a shut off.
"Given that the infrastructures that people draw on during prolonged disruptive life events can be damaged and/or serve as further sources of disruption and marginalization, we believe people can work around these issues is by relying on alternative infrastructures, repurposing existing infrastructures, or building new infrastructures, as a means for developing resilience."
Maintenance text:
"Rehabilitation efforts funded by the World Bank and IMF reflect a “tendency for neglected maintenance expenditures to be capitalized through ‘new build’ projects.” Maintenance is thus entangled with plans to open or protect access to markets or resources."
"All of the incentives for all the actors are against maintenance. Nobody ever named a maintenance project, nobody ever got recognized for a maintenance project, nobody ever much got blamed for deferring maintenance during the time while they were in office."
Slow Emergencies Text:
"The concept of slow emergencies points to those situations of harm and suffering that question what forms of life can and should be secured by Emergency governance. It helps translate un- or barely-bearable conditions inseparable from ordinariness into something demanding urgent action. A slow emergency is thus marked by the disjuncture between an emergency claim and the racializing assemblages (Weheliye 2014) that structure which subjects may claim a future in need of protection” → the experience of energy vulnerability as a slow emergency because the experience falls along lines of racial assemblages
"On the other hand, liberal order governs through emergency in the sense that claims to an emergency - sometimes strategic declarations that an emergency has happened, is happening or will happen - can justify actions that (re)order bodies and relations for pre-existing reasons"
“In a ‘state of emergency’ visible impacts and effects of power manifest in and through bodies, typically framed in terms of the production of ‘bare life’ (Agamben 1998). Research into racial violence following Hurricane Katrina (Braun and McCarthy 2005) and the 2010 Haiti earthquake (Mullings et al 2010), for instance, shows how action in a state of emergency draws on and reproduces black disaster victims as disposable lives (Giroux 2006) while pursuing a goal of sustaining the existing socioecological order.” → relates to COVID-19 emergency declarations, and how “essential worker” category reinforced the disposability of often low-income, health vulnerable bodies.
"More recently, geographers and other critical theorists have turned to concepts including ‘slow violence’ (Nixon 2011) and ‘slow death’ (Berlant 2011) to examine how racially and economically uneven processes of environment (in)justice fold harm, suffering, risk and premature death into the fabric of everyday life, particularly among poor and marginalized communities. Taken together, this and other research highlights that emergency is not only a dry juridical category, but signals a form of life structured through biopolitical techniques and mechanisms of racialization that delimit what lives can and should be exposed to banal forms of exceptional violence."
"Whether deforestation (Nixon 2011), or the cumulative wearing down of marginalized peoples by repeated ordinary acts of police violence (Fassin 2011), the forms of gradual change and indeterminate presence that characterize slow emergencies means that they sit uncomfortably with the genres that organize what is felt and attended to as an event and thus target of Emergency governance.” → deteriorating of homes in redlined neighborhoods in Philly is gradual, and has an indeterminate presence to external forces.
" situations become slow emergencies through projects by publics, artists and activists that attempt to make situations of attritional lethality into events that demand some form of urgent response. Emergency claims function, then, by opening up an ‘interval’ (Anderson 2015) in which action can make a difference, even as the risk remains that present harms and damages will continue or even intensify. Often, emergency claims or statements are rejected, ignored, or greeted with indifference precisely because of who makes them, how, and to whom. A slow emergency often involves, then, the non- or mis-recognition of a situation of emergent harm or damage, mediated through racialized techniques and procedures that produce that mis- or non-recognition"
"As emergencies are governed, the hope remains that the nonemergency everyday can be returned to. Ways of governing through emergencies are, then, founded upon the geo-historically specific distinction between the everyday and the emergency – a distinction that has only ever been available to some forms of life."
Infrastructuring reading:
In this paper, the author states that infrastructure becomes visible to people when it fails in general or fails for a subsect of the population. Infrastructure, especially information systems/technical systems like social media algorithms or AI facial recognition, follows normative logics as infrastructure is created by people, and therefore is embedded with values, biases, and perspectives. This can then disrupt people’s lives when the perspectives of those creating the infrastructure misaligns with the people using the infrastructure, thereby further marginalizing groups using infrastructure outside of these normative logics. This paper asks, when infrastructure breaks down or people become aware of the biases inherent to the infrastructure causing routine disruptions, how do people utilize technology to restructure their world to develop resilience?
Slow Emergencies Reading:
This paper argues that declaring emergencies is enacted in hopes that liberal status quo will be restored, however the dual realities of “emergency” and “non-emergency” only exist for certain bodies, while other bodies experience the everyday as what can be defined as emergency. Additionally, this text argues that governing through emergencies seeks to reconsolidate and restore the liberal order after disruption. Many policies put forth by the federal government during the emergency declaration during COVID-19 exemplify this, as one-time stimulus payments were made to maintain social order and restore the liberal status quo. More specifically relating to energy, energy assistance programs were not rethought as crisis ensued and more households were in need of energy assistance, and larger sums were necessary for households to avoid energy emergencies, but rather more funding was placed in preexisting pools for energy assistance to again restore the liberal status quo.