Unsettling Infrastructures that Settle: From the Andean Hacienda to a Minnesota Railway

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Through European colonization, plantations and haciendas became infrastructures that “settled.” These colonial infrastructures transformed social and ecological relations throughout the Americas as they displaced Indigenous peoples from the land. Later, other forms of infrastructure like railroads further “settled” frontier areas of new and growing nation-states. These forms of infrastructure accelerated settler colonialism while also accelerating access to commodities and new, single-use consumer goods, and industrial export agriculture. This paper travels between the Ecuadorian Andes and the Minnesota prairie to explore parallel, yet distinct, processes of infrastructures that settled and the ways in which people and other-than-human ecologies have, and continue to, unsettle those infrastructures.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37257.0