Infrastructure - often evoking images of past industrial triumphs and state-led modernisation - has re-emerged as a critical site of transformation and contestation in the 21st century. From the securitisation of ‘critical infrastructures’ to the energy transition and the rise of AI as a digital infrastructure, the material and technological foundations of society are being rapidly reimagined. Yet, infrastructures are not just technical assemblages; they are deeply political spaces where competing visions of the future collide.
This workshop invites participants to rethink the relationship between law and the material world by drawing on infrastructural thinking and its ‘conceptual kin’. Rather than casting law as a top-down regulatory framework acting upon inert material systems, we ask what it means to view it as co-constituted through heterogeneous, relational networks—where documents, sensors, contracts, pipes, and dashboards participate in legal meaning-making. As infrastructures become central to climate action, migration control, or algorithmic governance, so does the need to reflect on how law is practiced, felt, and contested within these assemblages.
Though the infrastructural turn in legal studies is already well underway, the motivation underlying this workshop is a sense of dissatisfaction with dominant analytical approaches. We posit that there is untapped potential in the friction between law—which tends to stabilise, define, and close (settle)—and infrastructural contestation, which exposes instability, multiplicity, and becoming (unsettle). This friction invites us to rethink law not as a neutral governance device but as a fragile, contingent assemblage that emerges through scripts, translations, and silences. Rather than offering immediate analytical comfort, infrastructural thinking can uproot settled modes of analysis when taken seriously.
In line with this problematisation, we do not aspire to simply ‘import’ infrastructural thinking into law, but to translate some of its ideas and insights so as to highlight elements frequently marginalised by legal reasoning: the partial connections, fractured materialities, and deferred responsibilities that legal infrastructures often obscure. The workshop thus calls for a double movement: first, to use infrastructural thinking to reimagine law as material and relational; and second, to complicate this reimagining through more than description, transformative aims inspired from feminist, decolonial, and care-based epistemes—conceptual companions that allow us to critique not only how infrastructures operate, but whose futures they enable, stabilise, or foreclose. In this spirit, the workshop becomes an invitation—not to fix infrastructural theories as a doctrinal method, but to mobilise its sensibilities: symmetry, relationality, care, and a commitment to stay with complexity.
As such, the workshop bridges traditional academic registers with artistic ones. In addition to brief presentations by a group of scholars exploring infrastructures and their legal entanglements from a variety of different viewpoints, the workshop will also feature a contribution from Elia Nurvista, an artist currently in residence at Villa Romana (Florence), who will present her past project on palm oil infrastructures. Elia’s practice engages the material, symbolic, and colonial genealogies of food, extraction, and land, offering an embodied counter-narrative to dominant techno-legal imaginaries. In this sense, the collaboration between legal scholarship and contemporary art is not an add-on but a methodological proposition: a way to unsettle the stabilising gestures of both law and science, and to foreground vernacular, decolonial, and care-based epistemologies.
We seek to open a space for transdisciplinary reflection on how legal forms travel through infrastructures and how infrastructures, in turn, produce novel legalities—sometimes stabilising order, sometimes generating friction, and always shaping possibilities for action.
Presentations and discussions will bring together socio-legal ethnographers to trace these dynamics across domains. All members of the EUI community interested in law’s material lives and infrastructural imaginaries are warmly invited.