Accepted abstract for special issue
Phd-student Nina Heidenstrøm and project manager Ardis Storm-Mathisen from SIFO submitted an abstract for a special issue about networks in the danish journal Akademisk Kvarter, which now has been accepted.
A full paper is to be submitted 15th August. The abstract is based on the fieldwork in Lærdal, and concentrate on the work done by households to reconnect when the ICT infrastructure failed.
Abstract:
How can the concept of networks contribute to understanding the role of households in crises where electricity and ICT infrastructure fail? Infrastructures are large-scale material networks crucial to modern human social organization and living: Connecting individuals intra and inter households and to their wider surroundings. However, material and social networks are often analysed separately in crisis studies. Drawing on fieldwork examining the role of households in a recent disaster in Norway that caused electricity and ICT outages, this article seeks to: (i) illuminate how Actor-Network Theory (Latour 2005) can aid in showing how social and material, small and large scale networks connect, and (ii) how the infrastructural breakdown translated into generating an effect of new temporal associations of actor-networks in these incidents. A critical reflection however is that practice theory (Shove et al. 2012) is needed to understand why parts of these re-constellations could happen in the case of households.