Thinking through an ethnography of infrastructure

Commonsensical reasoning, road sharing, and everyday infrastructural settlements

Bibliographic Data

ID8962572
AuthorsAlan Latham (0000-0002-6826-8906, UCL Geography London UK, corresponding author), Russell Hitchings (0000-0002-1171-8064, UCL Geography London UK), Michael Nattrass (UCL Geography London UK)
Year2025
Volume50
Issue3
Publication date2025-02-09
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueTransactions of the Institute of British Geographers (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0020-2754 • E-ISSN: 1475-5661
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/tran.12742
OpenAlexW4407376827
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited79

As human geography debates about infrastructures grow in sophistication, there is a need to deepen the discussion of how we study them. This paper responds by presenting a project focused on how road users evaluate different ways of dealing with the same shared infrastructure. With reference to work on everyday critical reasoning, it works through the challenges of doing an ‘ethnography of infrastructure’ and offers a framework for further research on what we call the ‘infrastructural settlement’ involved. The project began by accompanying regular cyclists on some of their rides in Carlisle, UK, so as to identify situations when the right response to the infrastructure was ambiguous. Videos of these situations were then discussed with three types of road user in the same city. Attending to the commonsensical reasonings they reached for in these interviews, we argue, allowed the project to surpass an implied vision of those who travel on the road in specific ways as either having their own unique experiences or being more likely to compete than cooperate with one another. The result is a new picture of how road sharing is collaboratively achieved and an argument about putting effective research design at the heart of the current conversation about infrastructure

Archaeology · Ethnography · Geography · Human settlement · Regional science · Sociology · Anthropology · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Urban Planning and Governance · Water Governance and Infrastructure

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