Rethinking our communicative past II: Colonialism, violence and infrastructure
25 – 26 September 2025
From the expansion of imperial telegraph and wireless networks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the deployment of UAVs and orbital satellites in the present day, imperial powers have long relied on extensive communication infrastructures to assert and sustain authority. This workshop invited critical engagement to examine how empires in colonial and post-colonial contexts project, maintain, and extend their power through infrastructures. By centring the role of violence in shaping and securing these networks, the workshop sought to move beyond reductive narratives of globalisation, emphasising instead the material and coercive dimensions of imperial communication systems.
This workshop invited scholars, artists, and archivists to explore the entangled relationships between infrastructural projects, regimes of colonial violence, and communication technologies. It encouraged participants to critically reassess dominant paradigms that have shaped our understanding of the communicative past. Participants traced the complex and often contradictory ways in which violence operated through, and in resistance to, infrastructure. Over the course of this two-day workshop, we shared work and reflected on how diverse scholarly and artistic practices might contribute to reimagining the communicative past and provide new frameworks for interpreting the enduring legacies of colonialism, violence, and infrastructure.
Videos from the workshop
Thursday 25th September
Panel 2: Global Communications and archive
Panel 3: Images from above: Screening and talk
Panel 4: Racialised infrastructures and neocolonialism
Friday 26th September
Panel 1: From subterranean to air: infrastructures of extraction and transmission
Panel 2: Birds eye view: Artist’s roundtable discussion
Panel 3: Media infrastructures of colonialism and neocolonialism