Marian Burchardt: Revisiting the Sociology of Infrastructure: Multiple Spatialities, Experimentality, and Medical Drones in Rural Malawi. [Abstract]

In this article, I explore the ways in which conflicts over space – whether as a scarce resource, a venue of performative practices, or a bounded territory to be managed – are shaped through infrastructural networks and provision. By infrastructure I mean the sociotechnical apparatuses that enable, shape, limit, and govern the circulation of goods, energy, knowledge, and capital. Empirically, I focus on the introduction of drones in Malawi’s healthcare system and emerging conflicts between different logistical providers. The article is based on the observation that spaces and infrastructural networks mutually shape and stabilize one another. At the same time, these techno-spatial configurations can be located at different scales, which they crisscross, and along diver-gent spatial formats and spatial orders, thereby producing multiple, materially mediated spatialities. The article examines the conflicts that underpin and emerge from these multiple spatialities and pays special attention to the ways in which they can be construed from the perspective of the sociology of infra-structure.

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