Cox, S. orcid.org/0000-0001-7686-0865 (2025) The infrastructural time of resilience: accounting for new (and old) forms of government in the South African grid. Geoforum, 160. 104209. ISSN 0016-7185
Abstract
Temporality has long, if implicitly, structured geographic research on resilience—whether by underwriting scholarly endeavors to show how resilience aligns with late 20th century neoliberal modes of intervention or to suggest that resilience demarcates a recent shift beyond them. It is evident, however, that a range of “old” and “new” governmental rationalities can be observed in resilience measures. To account for that simultaneity, I suggest that researchers turn to infrastructure. Doing so attunes us to the ensemble of historically-situated ethical and political projects that, as they are attached to and enacted through materials, create the complex political and physical terrains in and on which present-day resilience measures act. It also allows us to trace how the time horizons of infrastructure give shape to specific (de)centralized, collectivizing, and individualizing forms of resilience, which can be associated with a range of “old” and “new” governmental rationalities. I make this argument through a case study of the South African electricity system and measures taken to address its ongoing breakdowns. I show how the temporalities of finance, politics, development, and electricity have shaped the contemporary problem space in which resilience measures intervene, as well as the limited and interdependent forms that resilience is taking. In doing so, the paper advances new accounts of, and ways to account for, resilience today. Specifically, it reads contemporary resilience measures as temporal projects: insofar as these measures act on places, they also act on and through time.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: | |
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2025 The Authors. Except as otherwise noted, this author-accepted version of a journal article published in Geoforum is made available via the University of Sheffield Research Publications and Copyright Policy under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
Keywords: | Infrastructure; Resilience; Temporality; Energy transitions; Finance |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > School of Geography and Planning |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 24 Feb 2025 11:38 |
Last Modified: | 13 Mar 2025 17:10 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Elsevier BV |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104209 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:223667 |