Article ID: CBB551561342

(Dis)Connected Rail: Infrastructural Suspension and Phatic Politics in Romania (December 2020)

unapi

Adrian Deoancă (Author)


Transfers
Volume: 10
Issue: 2-3
Pages: 152-174


Publication Date: December 2020
Edition Details: Special section: On the promise and menace of Railroad Projects
Language: English

The political force of infrastructures is often attributed to their functioning as designed, while their political afterlives remain underexplored. In this article, I explore ethnographically the phatic force of ruins of infrastructure, by dwelling on a liminal railroad segment in Romania that remains unrehabilitated many years after its breakdown. Such an open-ended state of suspension allows the isolation of infrastructure's political and affective dimensions. The Giurgiu- Bucharest railroad met its demise in 2005 in the wake of heavy floods, producing an infrastructural gap that impacts local mobility and unravels the postsocialist social contract. State authorities and citizens engage in tactics of remediation that, while unsuccessful in resuming traffic, maintain a sense of phatic connection that kindles nostalgia for the past and frustrates anticipation of the future. These tactics make the railroad a medium for hope and at the same time a symbol for the absolute impossibility of hope.

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Associated with

Article Peter Schweitzer; Olga Povoroznyuk (December 2020) Introduction: Precarious Connections: On the Promise and Menace of Railroad Projects. Transfers (pp. 137-151). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB551561342/

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Authors & Contributors
Baatarnaran Tsetsentsolmon
Appel, Hannah
Guillermo Guajardo Soto
Andrey Vozyanov
Olga Povoroznyuk
Ildikó Zonga Plájás
Concepts
Technoscience; science and technology studies
Mobility
Infrastructure
Land transportation
Technology and society
Railroads
Time Periods
21st century
20th century, late
20th century
Places
Romania
Estonia
Tokyo (Japan)
Mexico City (Mexico)
Ukraine
Argentina
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