Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction. Keywords of the Anthropocene / Kregg Hetherington  1
Part I. Reckoning with Ground
1. The Underground as Infrastructure? Water, Figure/Ground Reversals, and Dissolution in Sardinal / Andrea Ballestero  17
2. Clandestine Infrastructures: Illicit Connectivities in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands / Shaylih Muehlmann  45
3. The Metropolis: The Infrastructure of the Anthropocene / Gastón Gordillo  66
Part II: Lively Infrastructures
4. Dirty Landscapes: How Weediness Indexes State Disinvestment and Global Disconnection / Ashley Carse  97
5. From Edenic Apocalypse to Gardens against Eden: Plants and People in and after the Anthropocene / Natasha Myers  115
6. Leaking Lines / Nikhil Anand  149
Part III: Histories of Progress
7. Low Tide: Submerged Humanism in a Colombian Port / Austin Zeiderman  171
8. Oysterstructure: Infrastructure, Profanation, and the Sacred Figure of the Human / Stephanie Wakefield & Bruce Braun  193
9. Here Comes the Sun?: Experimenting with Cambodian Energy Infrastructures / Casper Bruun Jensen  216
10. The Crisis in Crisis / Joseph Masco  236
References  261
Contributors  293
Index  297

Stephanie Wakefield

Ashley Carse

Bruce Braun

Joseph Masco

Casper Bruun Jensen

Gastón R. Gordillo

Natasha Myers

Shaylih Muehlmann

Austin Zeiderman

Nikhil Anand

Andrea Ballestero

“When the evidence of pollution and infrastructural decay is abundant, what kinds of critical response are relevant? The contributors to this outstanding collection demonstrate how insightful ethnographic research has the capacity to reveal pervasive and localized symptoms of environmental deterioration and, in the midst of these, is also able to detect the signs of possibility. The result is a compelling intervention in the debate about the planetary condition.” — Andrew Barry, University College, London

"Offering an original approach to contemporary concerns about infrastructures at a time of devastating environmental change, this impressive volume focuses on the political implications of the ways in which environments and infrastructures are conflated or kept apart. Through close attention to the shifting relations between figure and ground on which infrastructural politics ultimately depend, this outstanding intervention will shape critical discussions in anthropology, science and technology studies, and cultural geography." — Penny Harvey, coeditor of, Anthropos and the Material

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