Afterword. Relations, Refusal, Reticulation

Abstract

The articles in the special issue ‘Infrastructural Lives' draw attention to the ‘hidden transcript' of infrastructural practices in distinct urban and rural locations in India and Vietnam, showing technical labour, outright refusal, and improvisation across myriad reticulated connections to be elements of an ‘infrapolitics' that is practical, responsive, and reckons in various ways with the forces of calculability and control inherent in infrastructural expansion, digital surveillance, and urban redevelopment. The authors explore how roads are policed and navigated, how livelihoods are transformed by new technological systems, and how diverse tactics of negotiation and refusal can be mobilised to sustain lives. These articles demonstrate that tactics of resistance and refusal are elements in a wider infrastructural politics, sometimes ‘completing' networked systems and making them ‘work’ for marginalised populations, sometimes evading or refusing their logic of connection and circulation in preference to other patterns of circulation.