Infrastructure & the Back Loop: Christina Battle with Stephanie Wakefield

Infrastructure & the Back Loop: Christina Battle with Stephanie Wakefield

Contributors

As part of Christina Battle’s Fellowship with 221A, titled Imagining New Systems of Exchange, we invite you to a talk by Stephanie Wakefield. Throughout Christina’s fellowship, we have learned from Wakefield’s writing, especially their articulation an ecological concept called the Back Loop.

Described the “phases of release and reorganization, times of collapse, creative destruction and renewal” (1) that occur repeatedly across ecological systems. Considering our current moment, Wakefield reminds us that this is a time where we can “decid[e] for ourselves, locally and in diverse ways, where and how to inhabit the back loop.” (2) 

For this event, Wakefield will lead a conversation to help us think more deeply about infrastructures and the ways in which their reimagining might present an opportunity to consider crisis anew: “Exploring this crisis and its responses through the lens of infrastructure, I suggest, offers other possibilities for moving forward amidst the splinters of the present, not in order to merely survive or manage them, but to transcend and take hold of them in new and creative ways.” (3) 

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1: Wakefield, Stephanie. “Inhabiting the Anthropocene Back Loop.” Resilience International Policies, Practices and Discourses, Volume 6, Issue 2 (2018): 1-18, 
2: Ibid.
3: Wakefield, Stephanie. “Infrastructures of liberal life: From modernity and progress to resilience and ruins.” Geography Compass, Volume12, Issue7 (July 2018): 1-14

Project Support

City of VancouverVancouver Foundation