Edited collection with Rafico Ruiz, Canadian Journal of Communication. Vol. 46 No. 2 (2021)

From our introduction: “As researchers, we are fortunate that, especially if studying the contemporary moment, the tangible materials of infrastructural architectures are available for analysis, starting with how they have been inscribed on the land. Infrastructure, capitalist extractivism, postcolonial space, and a damaged environment are bound together through a set of relationships that cohere in the project of settler infrastructure building. While infrastructures are invariably and most often extractive, drawing from the land in the sense of taking space and making use of materials and resources, one of the central aims of this special issue is to gesture toward how infrastructures are themselves forms of mediation that are shaped by their material constitution. The materials and media of infrastructures signal a broad set of evolving relationships between humans and the environments they colonize, and how they cohere in highly contingent and mutable entities known as “infrastructures.” This issue examines the range of infrastructure as a category, one that can contain material registers as varied as salmon farming, mineral exploration, oil extraction, papermaking, emergency test signals, and more.”

Table of contents

• Guest Editorial: Materials and Media of Infrastructure Aleksandra Kaminska, Rafico Ruiz
• Hosting Cultures: Placing the Global Data Centre “Industry” Patrick Brodie
• Staking a Claim: Mineral Mining, Prospecting Logics, and Settler Infrastructures Hannah Tollefson
• Infrastructure that Sings: Kwawaka’wakw Social Media for Wild Salmon in the Broughton Archipelago Shirley Roburn
• Infrastructure and the Form of Politics Darin Barney
• Gaming Extractivism: Indigenous Resurgence, Unjust Infrastructures, and the Politics of Play in Elizabeth LaPensée’s Thunderbird Strike Jordan B. Kinder
• Acoustic Infrastructure: The Sounds and Politics of Radio Tests in American Emergency Broadcasting Andy Kelleher Stuhl
• From Labrador to Leipzig: Film and Infrastructures Along the Fur Trail Rachel Webb Jekanowski
• Mediating the Tree: Infrastructures of Pulp and Paper Modernity in The Bowater Papers Aleksandra Kaminska, Rafico Ruiz
• The Bridge Spanning Past, Present, and Future: Time Infrastructure Rob Shields
• Afterword: Infrastructural Fantasies Nicole Starosielski