This edited volume is an offshoot of a panel that I proposed and chaired earlier this year (https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/12/08/infrastructural-flesh-the-plural-body-in-the-global-city). Due to the stellar response to that CFP, and from the conversations we had around the theme, it was decided that we will plan an edited volume around the theme.

Volume Rationale

This edited volume seeks to rethink the interrelated concerns of body, culture, and plurality through the critical lenses of urban studies, architectural philosophy, infrastructure theory, and contemporary cultural production. We invite chapter proposals that examine how bodies—human, non-human, machinic, and ecological—are shaped, transformed, and regulated by the architectural, infrastructural, and cultural dynamics of contemporary global cities.

Cities today demand to be understood not merely as built environments but as multivalent assemblages of bodies, material systems, cultural imaginaries, and technological infrastructures. This volume approaches the city as an embodied condition: a site where multiple forms of “flesh”—organic, digital, atmospheric, and machinic—intersect and co-produce one another. In this formulation, the city is not a passive backdrop but a constitutive force, where bodies are continuously contoured by rhythms, circulations, and power geometries that exceed individual agency (Henri Lefebvre; Michel de Certeau).

Infrastructural Embodiment and Urban Ecologies 

A central concern of this volume is the politics of infrastructural embodiment. Infrastructures—roads, energy systems, data networks, and disaster-response architectures—operate not only as technical systems but also as what Brian Larkin describes as “poetic and material forms” that shape the textures of everyday life. As Achille Mbembe reminds us, infrastructures are deeply racialised and politicised, distributing exposure, vulnerability, and privilege unevenly across populations.

We are equally interested in the role of urban atmospheres—thermal, affective, toxic, or sanitised—in shaping modes of dwelling and cohabitation (Peter Sloterdijk). Within the context of the Anthropocene (Dipesh Chakrabarty; Jason W. Moore; Anna Tsing), cities emerge as bio-political and geo-ecological crucibles marked by heat islands, pollution, microplastics, and infrastructural breakdown. These conditions foreground how both human and non-human bodies absorb environmental stress in uneven and often unjust ways.

Plurality Beyond the Human

The question of plurality must extend beyond the human. Contemporary cities are dense with multispecies life—from stray animals to microbial ecologies—that produce complex, often invisible urban entanglements (Donna Haraway). We welcome approaches grounded in posthumanist and new materialist frameworks (Rosi Braidotti), which interrogate how the human body is increasingly entangled with digital systems, animal life, and machinic processes.

Contributors may engage, among other frameworks, with:

• Agential realism (Karen Barad), foregrounding the performativity of matter

• Individuation (Gilbert Simondon), examining co-evolutionary processes of bodies and built forms

• Cosmotechnics (Yuk Hui), exploring how infrastructures embody cultural and cosmological difference 

 Data Bodies and Affective Infrastructures

As cities become increasingly mediated by smart technologies, biometric governance, and ubiquitous sensing, the urban body is reconstituted as a data body—tracked, fragmented, and rendered legible to algorithmic systems (Shoshana Zuboff; Mark B. N. Hansen). This produces new forms of plurality, wherein a single subject occupies multiple, overlapping registers—legal, biometric, affective, and digital—each differently embedded within infrastructures of control and visibility, generating new forms of vulnerability (Paul Virilio).

At the same time, urban spaces function as archives of affect, holding and transmitting memory, trauma, care, and exclusion. We invite contributions that explore how architecture and infrastructure encode power geometries related to caste, race, gender, labour, and mobility, shaping lived experience in uneven ways (Lauren Berlant; Sara Ahmed; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick).

 Suggested Themes 

We invite contributions on topics including, but not limited to:

• Urban infrastructures as cultural technologies of embodiment

• Architecture, sensory production, and the somaesthetics of the city

• Climate, toxicity, and ecological vulnerability in urban contexts

• Data bodies, surveillance, and algorithmic governance

• Multispecies urbanism and posthuman cohabitation

• Affective infrastructures: love, grief, exhaustion, and care

• Speculative, futuristic, and cyberpunk imaginaries of urban life

• Migration, labour, and infrastructures of precarity

• Informality, marginality, and shadow infrastructures

• Sonic, visual, and atmospheric dimensions of urban embodiment 

 Aim of the Volume

This volume seeks to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue that demonstrates how urban embodiment is always infrastructural, always ecological, and always cultural. By bringing together perspectives from the humanities, social sciences, and allied fields, the collection aims to offer new conceptual frameworks for understanding the entanglements of bodies and cities in the contemporary moment.

 Submission Guidelines

• Abstracts of 300–400 words, along with a brief bio-note (150 words)

• Full chapters: 6,000–8,000 words

• Citation style: MLA 9th Edition

• Abstract deadline: 31 May, 2026

• Acceptances to be sent by 30 June, 2026

• Full paper submission deadline: 31 January, 2027

   

 Please send all submissions/queries to infrastructuralflesh@gmail.com.