Post-Human Infrastructure

“Posthuman” is a concept that critiques anthropocentrism and the philosophical branch of “humanism,” a dominant ethos that has shaped social relations and the way humans relate to the nonhuman world for centuries. Infrastructure is a word that “has been used in French since 1875 and in English since 1887, originally meaning ‘The installations that form the basis for any operation or system.’” Structure is typically defined as “an action or process of building or construction.” Our contemporary definition of structure can be traced from “structus, past participle of struere ‘to pile, place together, heap up; build, assemble, arrange, make by joining together.’” This is derived from *stere-, the Proto-Indo-European root meaning “to spread.”
Posthuman Infrastructure thinks about the life and nonlife of structures. It allows us to de-construct our own selves in relation to the more-than-human through the building of world.
www.water.ox.ac.uk/events/post-human-infrastructure