The texts assembled in this bibliography form a powerful theoretical constellation for a research project concerned with infrastructure, classification, memory, media, systems, fragility, and planetary design. Taken together, they allow us to move beyond the superficial understanding of infrastructure as merely technical support and instead approach it as a political, epistemological, material, and ecological condition through which contemporary life is organised. Their relevance lies not simply in the fact that they address similar themes, but in the way they collectively provide a methodological vocabulary for analysing how worlds are built, maintained, classified, remembered, mediated, governed, and rendered fragile.
Keller Easterling’s Extrastatecraft and Medium Design are foundational because they show that power today often operates through infrastructure space rather than through explicit law or visible ideology. In Extrastatecraft, Easterling demonstrates how free zones, logistics corridors, broadband networks, and spatial formulas produce new forms of sovereignty that exceed the traditional nation-state. This is highly relevant because our research requires attention to those hidden operational systems that govern space indirectly. Her concept of extrastatecraft helps us understand infrastructure as a disposition: not a passive background, but an active medium that scripts behaviour, organises capital, and produces political realities. Medium Design extends this argument by proposing that design should no longer focus only on objects, buildings, or masterplans, but on relations, tendencies, discrepancies, and organisational potentials. This is essential for our project because it allows us to analyse systems not only by what they declare, but by what they do.
Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star’s work deepens this infrastructural analysis by foregrounding classification, standards, and invisible labour. Sorting Things Out is crucial because it reveals that classification systems are never neutral; they are embedded moral and political technologies. Categories determine what becomes visible, measurable, governable, or excluded. This is directly relevant to any research concerned with infrastructure because infrastructures depend upon classificatory regimes: names, codes, standards, protocols, forms, databases, and administrative taxonomies. Their analysis of the International Classification of Diseases shows that even apparently objective systems are historically negotiated and ethically charged. Star’s “Ethnography of Infrastructure” adds a methodological imperative: we must study the boring things. Plugs, forms, standards, interfaces, cables, and maintenance routines are not secondary details; they are where power becomes durable and ordinary. Her idea of infrastructural inversion is particularly important because it teaches us to reverse the usual analytical gaze and foreground what normally remains backstage.
Bowker’s Memory Practices in the Sciences further expands this concern by showing that infrastructures are also regimes of memory. Scientific facts do not simply accumulate; they are stored, retrieved, synchronised, and stabilised through archival techniques. This matters because our research is not only about infrastructure as spatial or technical organisation, but also about how infrastructures produce temporal order. Bowker’s distinction between the mnemonick deep and the synchronised present helps us analyse how archives, databases, maps, and records create continuity while simultaneously erasing alternative histories. His work makes clear that knowledge infrastructures are never only about information; they are about what societies choose to remember, forget, compress, classify, and reactivate.
Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” is relevant because it provides an early conceptual blueprint for modern information infrastructures. His proposed memex anticipates hypertext, associative indexing, personal databases, and networked knowledge systems. Bush’s central problem—the impossibility of navigating the expanding “mountain of research”—remains central today. For our research, the essay matters because it links knowledge, memory, technology, and cognition. Bush’s idea that information should be organised through associative trails rather than rigid hierarchies resonates strongly with Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome, while also anticipating contemporary digital infrastructures. His essay helps us understand that media systems are not merely channels of communication; they shape how thought itself is organised.
Bruno Latour’s “Drawing Things Together” is indispensable because it explains how knowledge gains authority through inscriptions. Maps, diagrams, tables, charts, photographs, laboratory traces, and documents allow things to travel, accumulate, and become comparable. Latour’s concept of immutable mobiles is especially useful for our research because it explains how dispersed realities are rendered governable by being transformed into stable, transportable visual forms. This is relevant to infrastructure because infrastructures constantly convert the world into inscriptions: satellite images, GIS maps, climate models, logistics dashboards, medical records, architectural plans, and databases. Latour shows that objectivity is not the absence of mediation but the successful organisation of mediating devices. This gives our project a way to analyse visualisation as a form of infrastructural power.
Lisa Parks and Shannon Mattern extend this visual and material analysis into media infrastructure. Parks’ “Stuff You Can Kick” is especially important because it insists on the materiality of media systems. Against fantasies of immaterial digitality, Parks draws attention to poles, wires, satellite dishes, cables, workers, training routines, and discarded technological debris. Her work is relevant because it teaches us to look at the physical and labour-intensive underside of digital life. Communication networks are not clouds; they are grounded in territories, bodies, maintenance practices, and geopolitical arrangements. Mattern’s “Deep Time of Media Infrastructure” complements this by expanding the historical scale. She argues that media infrastructures did not begin with telecommunications or digital networks; cities have always been media environments structured by voice, inscription, ritual, walls, plazas, and surfaces. This is highly relevant because it prevents our research from treating infrastructure as a purely modern phenomenon. Mattern allows us to read the city as a palimpsest, where oral, textual, visual, acoustic, and digital systems coexist across deep time.
Donella Meadows’ Thinking in Systems gives the project a structural vocabulary for analysing complex behaviour. Her concepts of stocks, flows, feedback loops, delays, leverage points, and system traps are vital because they explain why infrastructures often produce unintended consequences. A system’s behaviour, Meadows argues, emerges from its internal structure rather than from isolated events. This is directly applicable to infrastructure, climate, governance, technology, and urbanism. Her work helps us avoid linear causality and instead analyse recursive dynamics: how flows accumulate, how feedback stabilises or destabilises systems, how delays produce surprise, and how interventions can fail when they target symptoms rather than structures. Meadows is therefore essential for translating theoretical concerns into a practical analytical framework.
Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s Intellectual and Manual Labour contributes a Marxist epistemological dimension. His concept of real abstraction shows that abstraction is not first a mental operation but a social practice embedded in commodity exchange. This is relevant because infrastructures are full of abstractions that appear neutral: prices, codes, metrics, standards, diagrams, classifications, protocols. Sohn-Rethel helps us understand how these abstractions emerge from material social relations and how they shape cognition itself. His distinction between intellectual and manual labour also connects strongly with Parks, Star, and Rubio, all of whom insist that infrastructures depend upon forms of work that are often hidden, undervalued, or disavowed.
Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, especially the “Rhizome” section, gives the project a non-hierarchical model of thought. The rhizome is relevant because infrastructures today are rarely linear or centrally organised. They are distributed, layered, recursive, adaptive, and heterogeneous. The rhizome allows us to conceptualise networks without reducing them to tree-like hierarchies. It also provides a language for assemblage, deterritorialisation, lines of flight, and multiplicity, all of which are useful for analysing how infrastructures connect bodies, institutions, technologies, territories, and signs. Their insistence that a book is not an object but an assemblage also resonates with the research method itself: our bibliography is not a list of isolated texts, but a network of concepts that must be plugged into one another.
Benjamin Bratton’s La Terraformación brings these questions to the planetary scale. His argument that the climate crisis requires planetary design is relevant because it pushes infrastructure studies beyond cities, media, and institutions toward Earth systems. Bratton rejects both naïve techno-utopianism and romantic anti-modernism. Instead, he argues that the Anthropocene demands new forms of planetary computation, automation, ecological governance, and synthetic coordination. For our research, this is important because it frames infrastructure as a planetary problem: energy systems, food systems, climate models, urbanisation, logistics, and atmospheric interventions are all part of a shared design condition. Bratton helps us ask what kinds of planetary infrastructures are necessary for survival, and who should govern them.
Finally, Fernando Domínguez Rubio’s introduction to Fragility offers perhaps the most important ethical corrective to the entire corpus. Rubio argues that modernity was built upon the disavowal of fragility: the belief that science, capitalism, and technology could overcome uncertainty, limits, and dependence. In the present planetary condition, however, fragility can no longer be denied. Crucially, Rubio does not define fragility as an inherent weakness. He defines it as a relational ecological condition: things are not fragile by nature; they are rendered fragile through particular arrangements of power, environment, labour, and care. This is decisive for our research because it prevents us from treating breakdown as accidental. Fragility must be analysed as something produced, distributed, maintained, and sometimes weaponised. Rubio’s concept of mimeographic labour—the work of maintenance, care, and repair that prevents worlds from falling apart—also ties together Star’s invisible work, Parks’ infrastructural labour, Meadows’ systemic maintenance, and Mattern’s residual infrastructures.
Together, these texts provide the foundation for a research project that understands infrastructure as much more than technical support. Infrastructure is a medium of sovereignty, a system of classification, a practice of memory, a visual regime, a labour process, a planetary apparatus, and a fragile ecological arrangement. The value of this bibliography lies in its capacity to move across scales: from the database to the city, from the power pole to the planet, from the classification form to the climate model, from the invisible worker to the geopolitical zone. It also gives us a methodological orientation: look at what is hidden, boring, residual, broken, maintained, classified, visualised, and rendered ordinary. These are the places where power is most durable.
For our research, then, these works are relevant because they allow us to formulate a central proposition: contemporary worlds are not simply designed through visible architecture or explicit policy, but through infrastructural assemblages that organise perception, memory, labour, movement, vulnerability, and possibility. To study them requires an interdisciplinary method capable of combining systems theory, media archaeology, science and technology studies, political economy, urban theory, and ecological thought. This bibliography gives us exactly that: a conceptual infrastructure for studying infrastructure itself.
