Please see the below panel CFP for the ISA 66th Annual Convention Chicago, Illinois, March 2nd - 5th 2025...

 

Infrastructure is the exoskeleton of global power formation. It configures and reconstructs spaces, peoples, and societies. Infrastructure galvanises global politics. One subsystem of global infrastructure is vital and yet unseen: undersea cables. TeleGeography confirms that these information super-highways account for 99% of cross-border data traffic. These undersea cables use fibre-optic technology to pass data literally at the speed of light. Yet, when it comes to examining, analysing, and theorising ICT undersea cable infrastructure as an essential component of global processes and power formation, a blind spot within IR scholarship becomes apparent. Somehow, we bizarrely miss this huge mutating mass of systems and networks. Recognising that much of the new theoretical work on infrastructure comes from other disciplinary perspectives, this panel offers a range of theoretical and empirical contributions that contribute to widening the discipline through accounts of the manifold transformations of undersea cable infrastructures. Focusing on undersea cables, this panel therefore argues that a 'wider' discipline, reconfigured to focus on the materiality of world politics, needs to account for how infrastructure brings together, breaks apart, and decomposes global connectivity.

 

Please send your abstracts of 200 words and 5 (ISA) keywords by 29 May 2024 to:

 

Elizabeth Cobbett elizabeth.cobbett@plymouth.ac.uk

Anne George a.m.george@sheffield.ac.uk

Ra Mason Ra.Mason@uea.ac.uk