The readings this week explore infrastructures imagined and anticipated. We will read Ashley Carse and David Kneas’s Unbuilt and Unifinished: The temporalities of infrastructure and an excerpt from Patricia Grace’s classic Potiki. These will be read alongside Doris Lusk’s Imagined Projects: Forty Years On

“There was warmth and noise in the house as the people waited for Mr. Dolman to speak, Dolman whom they had named “Dollarman” under the breath. Because although he had been officially welcomed, he was not in the heart welcome, or at least what he had to say was not.” - Patricia Grace, 'From Potiki: Chapter 13 Dollarman' In Indigenous Pacifiic Islander Eco-Literatures. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, (pp.330-335).
Link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv2524xpt.117?seq=1

Ashley Carse and David Kneas. 2019. Unbuilt and Unifished: The temporalities of infrastructure Environment and Society. 10(1): (pp. 9-28.)
Link: https://www.proquest.com/docview/2272834837?parentSessionId=3IQw5X1hfs0p0qb%2Fp5KXjQk56FJfbSCIquBh9AMxyPc%3D&sourcetype=Scholarly%20Journals

Reading Environments is a reading group open to all, for reading, listening and thinking together. Hosted by Eli Elinoff (Anthropology), Su Ballard (Art History), Bonnie Etherington, and Adam Grener (English Literatures and Creative Communication), Reading Environments brings together academics, students and interested members of the public to delve into and discuss current work in the Environmental Humanities that helps us navigate the changing environmental contexts of the planet.

On the occasion of Infrastructure: power, politics and imagination, the Reading Environments series continues under the theme Deluge. These meetings run across three Friday morning sessions pairing art works from the exhibition with selected readings. Reading Environments | Deluge engages with various onslaughts—material, conceptual, temporal, technical, political--associated with the making of infrastructural worlds. Each session develops a dialogue with a specific work from Infrastructure, pairing a conceptual reading with a piece of fiction or poetry.