Marco

Infrastructure Humanities is an agenda that enhances and broadens the scope of mobility humanities research, developed over the past seven years by the Academy of Mobility Humanities (AMH) at Konkuk University (Seoul). It initiates thinking about infrastructures as (im)material actants that shape and condition mobilities. Specifically, Infrastructure Humanities recognizes infrastructure as the essential determinant of human existence and a vital object of study for understanding humanity.

The infrastructural turn in humanities challenges us to reconsider infrastructure not as an external means or methods to human existence, but rather as an actant that constitutes human lives internally. It thus encourages us to understand individuals, societies, and, as their territory, the Earth itself, as ‘entities-being-with infrastructure.’ Contrary to the fetishization of infrastructure that often leads to the apocalyptic projections of the future, Infrastructure Humanities—by thinking of humans with and through infrastructure—investigates emergent practical ethics aimed at reconfiguring the relationship between humans and (im)material infrastructures in more sustainable forms.

Moreover, Infrastructure Humanities seeks to establish an international research model for infrastructure studies, building a global collaborative research platform from the humanities perspective. This research program facilitates cooperation and mutual exchanges at the grassroots level, both locally and globally. Such collaboration is necessary for addressing the infrastructure-induced polycrisis: tackling crises related to infrastructures across scales —individual, social, and planetary —requires a shared understanding of the problems among citizens, corporations, academia, governments, and international organizations. To this end, Infrastructure Humanities seeks to develop a global ecosystem for infrastructure humanities research.

Using a very common metaphor, we could say that the city is a text put in motion by diverse human and non-human agents. Urban mobilities are conveyed through discourses, texts, and narratives of various kinds. The city can therefore be seen as a rich interweaving of textual forms, which compose an extremely articulated fabric that contributes to shaping mobilities in the past, present, and future. Adopting a textual approach to the urban means also considering cities as communication devices and environments, semantic containers, sets of signs that produce meaning, have symbolic and performative powers. In this immaterial layer there is always an implied agency of materials, objects, and things that compose and animate urban life and interact with textualisation processes.

In recent years, literary urban studies, in addition to investigating literary works dedicated to cities, have worked to expand their field of action by interpreting the complex of contemporary urban phenomena through the broader filter of narrative and text. Moreover, according to a geosemiotic and a design-oriented approach, the city is not only mediated by texts of various kinds but is itself a text as a material support in which a considerable amount of signs is inscribed. Drawing inspiration from these and other developments in research within the well established field of ‘cities and/as texts’, the project focuses on urban mobilities as an area particularly interested in the interweaving of narratives and objects, texts and non-human entities, meanings and things.

This allows for the adoption of multiple theoretical perspectives, including object-oriented philosophies, enactivist approaches to narratives, mobilities design, new materialisms, future studies, infrastructure studies, literary urban research, urban history and urban geography. The dialogue implemented between scholars from different backgrounds and the organized activities will also allow for a methodological exchange, which will include mobile and creative methodologies, close reading, discourse analysis, embodied ethnography, archival research on urban environments, among others.

Main activities:

1. Participation in the T2M (International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility) Conference held in Eindhoven (NL) 4-7 November 2025 with a MoHu panel titled “Reading, enacting, and prospecting alternative mobilities: cities, texts and materialities”.
2. Organization of a scientific event at our MoHu centre in Padua to be held in early 2026 (February) with some invitations of scholars who are connected with the MoHu through existing formal partnerships. The event will not only host such main partners but will also involve early career Dissgea scholars (PhD and postdoc) as well as Dissgea students, by hosting a Poster Session open to final dissertation projects and other works by MA students of Dissgea working on conference-related themes.

External Participants & Partnerships:

Simone Fari, University of Granada, MoHu past visiting

Ole B. Jensen, Aalborg University, MoHu honorary member and past visiting

CRPM (Centre de recherches pluridisciplinaires et multilingues) ESPACE, DÉPLACEMENT, MOBILITÉ GROUP based at UNIVERSITÉ PARIS NANTERRE. Referents: Lucia Quaquarelli and Adrien Frenay

MOBILITIES IN LITERATURE AND CULTURE RESEARCH CENTRE based at the UNIVERSITY OF SURREY. Referent: Gabriele Lazzari

FRINGE URBAN NARRATIVES research network, based at the UNIVERSITAT AUTÒNOMA DE BARCELONA. Referent: Patricia Garcia

This joint research project, conducted by the University of Padua (DiSSGEA) and the University of South Africa’s Department of Geography (Pretoria), centers on the pivotal Battle of Isandlwana (1879). The primary scientific goal is to understand and quantify the influence of the geomorphological context on military mobilities, the spatial dynamics and ultimate outcome of the battle, integrating historical analysis with advanced geospatial data.

The program employs a multidisciplinary methodology that combines historical-archival research, on-site geomorphological surveys, high-resolution data acquisition via drones (orthophotos, DTM), and geomagnetic investigations to identify subsurface anomalies. All collected data will be processed and integrated within a GIS environment. Beyond its scientific aims, this project holds significant strategic importance, presenting a concrete opportunity to establish a lasting and fruitful relationship between the University of Padua and the University of South Africa, laying the groundwork for future academic agreements.

Key scientific objectives

The project aims to achieve the following primary scientific objectives:

• to analyze and quantify how the specific geomorphological features of the Isandlwana site (slopes, landforms, hydrography, surface lithology) conditioned the tactical choices, troop movements, lines of sight, and the final result of the battle.
• to integrate historical sources with high-resolution geospatial data to produce a more accurate, georeferenced reconstruction of the phases, deployments, and key events of the battle within its physical context.
• to use non-invasive geophysical methods (magnetometry) to locate and characterize anomalies indicative of archaeological remains related to the battle (metal artifacts, possible structures, burial areas) and to interpret this evidence within its historical and environmental framework.
• to test and refine a multidisciplinary methodological approach that effectively combines historical analysis, geomorphology, remote sensing, and geophysics for the complex study of battlefield landscapes.
• to provide a more holistic understanding of the battle by fully embedding it in its physical and environmental context, assessing the interactions between military events and landscape features.

Expected outcomes & verifiable deliverables

The project is set to produce a range of concrete deliverables:

• detailed geomorphological cartography of the Isandlwana site.
• georeferenced historical-military cartography illustrating the battle’s progression within the terrain’s context.
• high-resolution 3D terrain models and orthomosaics derived from drone surveys.
• maps of geomagnetic anomalies that potentially indicate archaeological remains.
• an integrated geospatial database (GIS).
• scientific publications in international journals and presentations at academic conferences.

Connections. Arts and Humanities for Just Mobility Futures is an open-access publication in three languages (English, Italian, and Korean) authored by Peter Adey, Jinhyoung Lee, Peter Merriman, Lynne Pearce, Veronica della Dora, Sasha Engelmann, Simone Gigliotti, Harriet Hawkins, Jooyoung Kim, Taehee Kim, Giada Peterle and Tania Rossetto. The book emerged as a joint reflection based on years of networking activities carried out among various partners in the UK (Lancaster University Centre for Mobilities Research, Royal Holloway University of London Centre for the GeoHumanities, Aberystwyth University Centre for Transport and Mobility) and South Korea (Konkuk University Academy of Mobility Humanities).

The book is a product of both UK and South Korean research grants. The UK grant was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) through a UKRI UK-South Korea Social Science and Humanities Connections Grant, part of UKRI’s Fund for International Cooperation (FIC). This project was titled “Connecting Mobilities Research between the UK and South Korea: narrating, mobilising, experimenting and engaging mobilities for just futures” (reference: ES/W010895/1), and involved investigators based in the Royal Holloway University of London and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Aberystwyth University, Lancaster University, and Konkuk University. The team also received funding from KNRF’s Humanities Korea + (HK+) programme (reference: NRF-2018S1A6A3A03043497), in conjunction with a Korean research grant “Mobility Humanities based on the Coevolution of Human being and Technologies”. The Italian translation was funded by the UK grant and carried out by Giuseppe Tomasella for the MoHu Centre.

The Centre for Advanced Studies in Mobility and the Humanities (MoHu) has emerged as a travel companion on this journey, creating further connections and triangulations that have enriched and added nuances to the mobility and humanities binomial. Director Tania Rossetto particularly wishes to thank all her colleagues at the Centre, as well as the past director, Andrea Caracausi, for their collegial work in organising and animating events, conferences, seminars, publications, and meetings with colleagues from Royal Holloway, Aberystwyth, Lancaster, and Konkuk. In particular, thanks to the MoHu’s support, it was possible for the Paduan delegation – including Giada Peterle, Margherita Cisani, Laura Lo Presti, Chiara Rabbiosi, Paola Molino, Marco Bertilorenzi, Lucio Biasiori and Federico Mazzini – to meet colleagues at several venues in Italy, the UK and Seoul.

From the Introduction:

“This book is interested in connection and connecting our  approaches and ideas of mobility. It is interested in these issues, however, in quite a specific way. On one hand, it seeks to make sense of connections between old and emerging concepts and approaches towards mobility that are more sensitive and open to the ethos, methods and practices of research from the arts and humanities. […] On the other hand, the book acknowledges the imperative to direct these new and emerging encounters and connections between mobilities and the arts and humanities towards more equitable, just and sustainable mobility futures, even as it pushes against the constraints and challenges of a neoliberal academy. For mobility arts and humanities cannot operate in a vacuum but simultaneously realises the constitutive role of mobility in the pressing social, political, economic and environment crises of our time, now, and in the future, and what has come before”

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