Artwork

Content provided by The MIT Press. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by The MIT Press or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://ro.player.fm/legal.
Player FM - Aplicație Podcast
Treceți offline cu aplicația Player FM !

Dirk Van Laak, "Lifelines of Our Society: A Global History of Infrastructure" (MIT Press, 2023)

37:02
 
Distribuie
 

Fetch error

Hmmm there seems to be a problem fetching this series right now. Last successful fetch was on November 08, 2024 09:32 (6d ago)

What now? This series will be checked again in the next day. If you believe it should be working, please verify the publisher's feed link below is valid and includes actual episode links. You can contact support to request the feed be immediately fetched.

Manage episode 385856064 series 2485260
Content provided by The MIT Press. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by The MIT Press or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://ro.player.fm/legal.

Infrastructure is essential to defining how the public functions, yet there is little public knowledge regarding why and how it became today's strongest global force over government and individual lives. Who should build and maintain infrastructures? How are they to be protected? And why are they all in such bad shape?

In Lifelines of our Society: A Global History of Infrastructure (MIT Press, 2023), Dr. Dirk van Laak offers broad audiences a history of global infrastructures—focused on Western societies, over the past two hundred years—that considers all their many paradoxes. He illustrates three aspects of infrastructure: their development, their influence on nation building and colonialism, and finally, how individuals internalise infrastructure and increasingly become not only its user but regulator.

Beginning with public works, infrastructure in the nineteenth century carried the hope that it would facilitate world peace. Dr. van Laak shows how, instead, it transformed to promote consumerism's individual freedoms and our notions of work, leisure, and fulfilment. Lifelines of Our Society reveals how today's infrastructure is both a source and a reflection of concentrated power and economic growth, which takes the form of cities under permanent construction. Symbols of power, Dr. van Laak describes, come with vulnerability, and this book illustrates the dual nature of infrastructure's potential to hold nostalgia and inspire fear, to ease movement and govern ideas, and to bring independence to the nuclear family and control governments of the Global South.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

  continue reading

492 episoade

Artwork
iconDistribuie
 

Fetch error

Hmmm there seems to be a problem fetching this series right now. Last successful fetch was on November 08, 2024 09:32 (6d ago)

What now? This series will be checked again in the next day. If you believe it should be working, please verify the publisher's feed link below is valid and includes actual episode links. You can contact support to request the feed be immediately fetched.

Manage episode 385856064 series 2485260
Content provided by The MIT Press. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by The MIT Press or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://ro.player.fm/legal.

Infrastructure is essential to defining how the public functions, yet there is little public knowledge regarding why and how it became today's strongest global force over government and individual lives. Who should build and maintain infrastructures? How are they to be protected? And why are they all in such bad shape?

In Lifelines of our Society: A Global History of Infrastructure (MIT Press, 2023), Dr. Dirk van Laak offers broad audiences a history of global infrastructures—focused on Western societies, over the past two hundred years—that considers all their many paradoxes. He illustrates three aspects of infrastructure: their development, their influence on nation building and colonialism, and finally, how individuals internalise infrastructure and increasingly become not only its user but regulator.

Beginning with public works, infrastructure in the nineteenth century carried the hope that it would facilitate world peace. Dr. van Laak shows how, instead, it transformed to promote consumerism's individual freedoms and our notions of work, leisure, and fulfilment. Lifelines of Our Society reveals how today's infrastructure is both a source and a reflection of concentrated power and economic growth, which takes the form of cities under permanent construction. Symbols of power, Dr. van Laak describes, come with vulnerability, and this book illustrates the dual nature of infrastructure's potential to hold nostalgia and inspire fear, to ease movement and govern ideas, and to bring independence to the nuclear family and control governments of the Global South.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

  continue reading

492 episoade

Toate episoadele

×
 
Loading …

Bun venit la Player FM!

Player FM scanează web-ul pentru podcast-uri de înaltă calitate pentru a vă putea bucura acum. Este cea mai bună aplicație pentru podcast și funcționează pe Android, iPhone și pe web. Înscrieți-vă pentru a sincroniza abonamentele pe toate dispozitivele.

 

Ghid rapid de referință