Carcerality: Golnar Nikpour will discuss changing approaches to carceral infrastructures in Iran, where prisons and prison populations mushroomed over the twentieth century. In the 1920s, a few hundred people were detained by the centralizing, Europe-facing Pahlavi government. By 1979, that number was 20,000 and now, under the Islamic Republic, it is a quarter of a million. Iran’s government is also introducing cutting-edge carceral technologies like biometric surveillance, ankle-monitors, and other forms of what scholars have called “prison by another name.”

Military: Richard Nisa’s research focuses on the changing role that military detainment infrastructures played in shaping the contours of US global warfare after 1945. He details the evolution of the circulatory systems that make battlefield apprehension possible: the routines and schedules; food and materials provisioning systems; legal, doctrinal, and humanitarian policies; and technologies of mobility, surveillance, and data management. While central to the prosecution of war, many of these practices are designed not to kill or injure enemy bodies but to care for them in specific and highly instrumental ways. They are also sites of considerable resistance, sabotage, and political mobilization.

Capitalism: Patrick Chung’s work explores the impact of US militarization on the Cold War Pacific. Specifically, it shows how the US military’s sustained presence in the region promoted the adoption of capitalist institutions in nations like South Korea. Chung will discuss the vital role of transportation infrastructure in US military operations on the Korean peninsula. More than just a means for moving men and materiel, infrastructure became key sites of capitalist accumulation. By examining the businesses involved in infrastructure construction, Chung will show how militarization and capitalism developed in lockstep during the Cold War.

Migration: Karen Miller focuses on the houses, farms, roads, ports, steamship lines, seed cooperatives, and other structures built to help facilitate the expansion of commercial agriculture in the Philippines South in the twentieth century. She shows how speculators and migrants from northern and central lowland areas claimed that they were developing these systems as the foundation upon which the modern state could develop. Facing attacks from a migrant/settler bureaucracy, violence, coercion, and fraud, indigenous populations fought to sustain their own infrastructures, including the networks, trade patterns, farming practices and political economies they had built.