Beyond linear progress: Towards a material-temporal understanding of infrastructural unmaking
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The implementation of low-carbon futures requires both the assembling of new technologies, and practices, as well as the ‘unmaking’ of extant high-carbon infrastructures. Here, we bring together geographical, STS, anthropological, and sociological thinking on time to problematise extant conceptualisations of such processes of unmaking. We argue that a focus on temporalities is especially pertinent to the unmaking of material energy infrastructure, as the emergence of fossil fuel societies has also enabled a particular temporality of the future to take hold; one that is linear, future-oriented, and full of promise. The unmaking of energy infrastructures will likely rub up against this temporal form of thinking that dominates modern life. By drawing on three temporal concepts – ruination, suspension, and lingering – we explore how we can conceptualise the temporal dimensions of unmaking material infrastructures more explicitly, and differently. Through foregrounding the multifaceted interactions between the legacies of the past, the realities of the present, and the possibilities of the future we put forward an understanding of infrastructural unmaking and low-carbon futures that seeks to go beyond the confines of linear progress.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.046 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.030 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".