Introduction: The Challenge of New Materialism for the History of Infrastructure.

Abstract

Do infrastructures possess thing-power? Do they act independently of humans, and how might materiality help us better describe the relationship between humans and infrastructures? This special section explores the promises and limits of new materialism for the history of infrastructure, complicating conventional understandings of the built world. New materialist approaches posit that the material world has intrinsic capacities-forms of agency that operate beyond human intent. While infrastructures are human-made, their assembly and operation involve numerous nonhuman actors and forces outside human control. The articles in this section approach infrastructures through material artifacts such as jamming sluice gates, minuscule sand particles, toxic creosote, crumbling concrete, and even the ionosphere. They examine how humans responded to these substances, structural components, expected material properties, and unknown matter like the ionosphere. This perspective reframes our understanding of infrastructure, knowledge production, and human-technology relations by foregrounding the thing-power embedded in the human-made environment.