Polar infrastructures

This chapter draws from recent anthropological literature on the politics and poetics of infrastructure (Larkin 2013) and my ongoing ethnographic research in the Antarctic Peninsula, to argue that both infrastructures‒as built networks that facilitate circulation of goods, people and data, and logistics; as the coordination and control of movement of people and things along and within global supply chains‒are crucial to the establishment and subsistence of semi-permanent settlements, and, as such, they are deeply implicated in the making and unmaking of experiences of community, solidarity, and peculiar modes of belonging in extreme polar environments.