The Cultural Studies Cell

Department of English and Cultural Studies, Central Campus

In collaboration with

Department of Media Studies, Central Campus

CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bangalore

Organizes

An International Conference (Hybrid)on

Urban/Media Infrastructures

March 5-7, 2026

Infrastructure has emerged as a central analytic across urban studies, anthropology, geography, and media studies. Scholars have moved beyond treating infrastructure as a purely technical or functional backdrop to social life, emphasizing instead its political, cultural, and affective dimensions (Star 1999; Larkin 2013). Urban infrastructure such as airports, flyovers, metro rail systems, highways, underpasses, logistics corridors has been shown to actively organize space, mobility, and citizenship, producing uneven geographies of access, visibility, and belonging (Graham & Marvin 2001). At the same time, media scholars have foregrounded infrastructure as fundamental to understanding contemporary mediation, drawing attention to platforms, networks, cables, sensors, screens, and data systems that shape communication, perception, and power (Parks & Starosielski 2015).

This conference brings these conversations together by starting from the premise that urban and media infrastructures are co-constituted. Urban infrastructures are increasingly media-saturated environments of surveillance, signage, data capture, and algorithmic governance, while media infrastructures are deeply embedded in urban materialities—land, labor, energy, architecture, and mobility. Airports function as zones of intensified mediation and security; metro systems reorganize not only circulation but also regimes of attention and visibility; flyovers and underpasses become sites of informal media practices, advertising, and contestation. These entanglements are especially pronounced in cities of the Global South, where rapid urbanization, infrastructural deficits, informal economies, and colonial and postcolonial legacies shape distinctive configurations of urban/media life (Simone 2004).

Rather than framing Global South cities as belated or deficient versions of Northern urbanism, the conference invites papers that treat them as critical sites for theorizing infrastructure itself. How do breakdown, repair, improvisation, and informality complicate dominant accounts of seamless connectivity? How do infrastructural projects mediate experiences of class, caste, gender, race, and citizenship? What new forms of visibility, control, and resistance emerge at the intersection of urban space and media systems?

We invite empirically grounded and theoretically engaged papers that explore urban/media infrastructure as lived, mediated, and contested formations, with a strong focus on Global South contexts.

Suggested sub-themes include (but are not limited to):

• Infrastructures of mobility, speed, and mediation
• Platforms, data infrastructures, and urban governance
• Informality, maintenance, and infrastructural repair
• Sensory, affective, and embodied experiences of infrastructure
• Media, infrastructure, and surveillance regimes
• Comparative, decolonial, and Southern approaches to infrastructure

We welcome contributions from media studies, urban studies, anthropology, geography, cultural studies, and allied fields.

Note: Selected papers will be published in Peter Lang’s CUECS Series on Interdisciplinary Humanities in the 21st Century

Please send your abstracts of around 300 words and a bio-note of 50 words to csc@christuniversity.in

Important Dates and Registration Fee:

Registration fee: INR 2500

Last date to submit abstract: February 16, 2026

Intimation of Selection: February 20, 2026

Payment of Registration Fee: March 1, 2026

Submission of draft (3000-5000 words): March 03, 2026

Conveners:

Mithilesh Kumar, Assistant Professor, CHRIST (Deemed to be University) Bangalore

Amoolya Rajappa, Assistant Professor, CHRIST (Deemed to be University) Bangalore

V. Nishant, Assistant Professor, CHRIST (Deemed to be University) Bangalore

Prachi Pinglay, Professor of Practice, CHRIST (Deemed to be University) Bangalore

Kailash Koushik, Assistant Professor, CHRIST (Deemed to be University) Bangalore

References

Graham, Stephen, and Simon Marvin. 2001. Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities, and the Urban Condition. London: Routledge.

Larkin, Brian. 2013. “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.” Annual Review of Anthropology 42: 327–343.

Parks, Lisa, and Nicole Starosielski, eds. 2015. Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2004. For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Star, Susan Leigh. 1999. “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.” American Behavioral Scientist 43 (3): 377–391.