인프라 인문학과 인프라 텍스트 연구 시론

Infrastructure Humanities and Infrastructural Text Studies

Drawing on recent developments in the humanities that have foregrounded infrastructure’s critical significance in people’s biological and social lives today, this article advances a new research field of “infrastructure humanities” as a cross-disciplinary research on world-(re)making based on the complex dispositions and conceptual potentials of infrastructure. Chapter 2 provides a comprehensive overview of the theoretical underpinnings of this research by outlining four key dimensions of infrastructure: spatial, temporal, aesthetic, and fictional. Based on this theoretical underpinnings, infrastructure humanities seeks to facilitate cross-disciplinary research and a dynamic understanding of world-(re)making processes. Chapter 3 introduces “infrastructure text studies” as a methodology for practicing “infrastructure humanities,” which position texts as a medium for the research. The following methodological trajectories are hereby proposed: infrastructural narrative studies, which examines narrative representations of infrastructure; infrastructural affect studies, which explores affective encounters between humans and infrastructures; and text-infrastructure cultural politics, which analyzes how texts as infrastructural practices intervene in socio-political configurations of real-world. This article, thus, seeks to be an infrastructure for an emerging and promising crossdisciplinary research of “infrastructure humanities.”