Paper presentation (with Rafico Ruiz) on the Bowater Papers archive, as part of the Materials and Media of Infrastructure panels: The Bowater Papers is a trade magazine that was published periodically by the Bowater Paper Corporation, based in London, running from 1950 to 1958. As the magazine’s inaugural editorial, “Thoughts on Paper,” begins: “Paper is the raw material of human communication; it binds together continents; history would be lost without it; [sic] for it is the link between the past and the future. But paper, the commodity, is not only for the chronicler.” This “large paper-manufacturing organization,” in the mid-1950s the largest producer of newsprint in the world, launched the magazine with a view to both creating and cataloguing its enterprise as a consolidating infrastructural network of paper producers and consumers. The series of four issues were intended to embody and materially contain the entire array of papers, paper products, and paper derivatives that the Bowater Paper Corporation’s global manufacturing system produced and promoted. Each issue is an “exposition of paper in use,” with inserts …

Rafico Ruiz and I are co-chairing a double-panel at the Canadian Communication Association this year called Materials and Media of Infrastructure: Infrastructures are increasingly at the forefront of critical communication studies. Rather than remaining in the operational background that subtends our contemporary digital landscape, these infrastructures establish “the rules governing the space of everyday life” (Easterling 2014), emerging as integral “chokepoints” (see Limn issue 10, 2018) that reveal the varied materials that both make up and travel across them. Whether oil pipelines or the infrastructures of the newsprint industry, examining the materials, materialities, and media of infrastructural arrangements allows for a better understanding of the social, political and cultural configurations that they make possible. Functioning in this way as logistical media (eg. Durham Peters), these visible and invisible infrastructures ultimately shape the movements and mediations of data and information. This double panel seeks to explore the relationships between materials and logistical politics by examining the ways in which infrastructures enact particular forms of mediation that are enabled and constrained by their varied material properties and …