Narrativising Infrastructure

Special issue for The Global South

Issue editors:

Goutam Karmakar, University of Hyderabad, India

Payel Pal, The LNM Institute of Information Technology, India

Infrastructure is a crucial element that determines people's direct interactions with one another and their surroundings within any spatial framework, thereby enhancing its social and material components. The expanding corpus of literature by urban scholars and geographers concentrating on the built environment has unquestionably facilitated multidisciplinary approaches that transcend the perception of infrastructure as solely composed of inanimate material apparatus and constructions. Instead, it emphasizes the concurrent social, cultural, and human dimensions of infrastructural relationships, prompting inquiries into the degree to which infrastructure fosters liveability and its benefits for various populations. This indicates that infrastructure serves as a primary conduit for state machinery, functioning as a locus where politics, policy, planning, and implementation intersect with capitalist and developmental initiatives. Simultaneously, infrastructure also serves as a locus for the manifestation of societal authority, encroachment, and injustice, influenced by class, caste, race, ethnicity, and citizenship, to uphold hegemony, structures of power, and the interconnected nexus of collaboration between governmental and non-governmental organizations, both within and outside the realm of nation-state politics. In these circumstances, individuals experience infrastructural violence, as disproportionate socio-spatial structures, developmental initiatives, and technological advancements may reinforce brutality, inequalities, and hardships for specific societal segments, which simultaneously lack essential infrastructural amenities required for their survival, thereby highlighting both active and passive forms of structural violence. This prompts a discourse on the responsibility that society has regarding this detrimental impact and encourages engagement in creating a just environment, community, city, and civilization. We need to investigate how the communal nature of infrastructure serves as a potent framework for contemplating our obligations to the code and its constituents, as well as for recognizing those who interfere with this responsibility and for devising sustainable spatial structures. Instead of concentrating solely on acts of violence, unfair practices, precarity, vulnerability, and human rights perspectives, we need to consider strategies to address these issues, develop alternative visions for infrastructure, engage in more substantive discussions of spatial discourse, and contemplate methods for infrastructural repair. This affirmative and constructive approach to comprehending or conceptualizing infrastructure can facilitate more inclusive and participatory methods of knowledge-sharing, thereby contributing to a rethink of more nuanced ways to adhere to sustainable developmentalism and collective well-being.

Considering these ethical principles, this special issue addresses the issues discussed as points of intervention and aims to highlight the different facets of infrastructure in literary narratives, a subject that requires critical analysis and warrants significant attention. This special issue primarily examines the literature of the Global South, initiating a discourse on narratives that address infrastructure, its components, characteristics, dynamics, and governing forces, and explores themes of violence, injustice, and other manifestations of inequity. The objective is to foster not just discourse on showcasing the factors contributing to infrastructural violence, spatial injustice, and so on, but also to catalyze specific efforts for the implementation of repair frameworks through varied narratives derived from the experiences of communities in the Global South. Here narratives, as the special issue covers, encompass diverse literary genres like poems, fiction, non-fiction, drama, life writings, and graphic narratives, among others. Some of the areas that this special issue would like to cover, explore, and investigate through literary narratives are as follows:

• Spatial injustice and ramifications
• Infrastructure, capitalism and developmentalism
• Infrastructural violence and epistemic injustice
• Infrastructural violence and environmental injustice
• Infrastructure and gendered violence
• Infrastructure, neocolonial and neoliberal politics and policies
• Infrastructure and extractivism
• Infrastructure and multispecies discourses
• Infrastructural repair and horizontal dialogues
• Decolonial repair and infrastructural dimensions

The call can be accessed here: https://olemiss.app.box.com/s/drc8ylfo0hy0ii08b5811rxwhtbb0v8g

Submission deadlines and guidelines

Potential contributors are welcome to discuss other unmentioned areas related to infrastructure with the guest editors. An abstract of 500-word length together with the author’s biographical note (maximum 100 words) will be sent as a single MS Word file by email to the guest editors, Goutam Karmakar (goutamkarmakar@uohyd.ac.in) and Payel Pal (payel.pal@lnmiit.ac.in), with a copy to the journal’s editor, Leigh Anne Duck (lduck@olemiss.edu), no later than November 30, 2025.

For questions and informal enquiries, prospective authors should not hesitate to contact the guest editors by email. A decision on your submission will be communicated by January 15, 2026. Author submission guidelines will be sent to the respective contributors in due course.

Notes on editors

Goutam Karmakar teaches at the Department of English, University of Hyderabad in India, with affiliations at the University of Cologne, Germany, and Durban University of Technology, South Africa. He has received prestigious fellowships, including the Alexander von Humboldt and National Research Foundation awards. His research spans Global South literature, postcolonial and decolonial studies, and environmental humanities. Karmakar edits the journal Global South Literary Studies and the Routledge book series South Asian Literature in Focus.

Payel Pal is an Associate Professor of English at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, LNMIIT, Jaipur, India. Her research areas include South Asian literature, postcolonial studies, ecology, and film and cultural studies. She is one of the series editors for the Routledge book series South Asian Literature in Focus.