Humanities Academy

The Empowerment Reading Seminar

2026.01.28~2026.12.31 / #1106, New Millennium Hall

  • The 15th Empowerment Reading Seminar

    Date & Time: Wednesday, 30 September 2026
    13:00 ~ 15:00
    Book: Anand, N., Gupta, A., & Appel, H. (Eds.). (2018). The Promise of Infrastructure. Duke University Press.
    Part I: Time
    ■ 1. Infrastructural Time — Injin Woo (Hyperobject Team)
    ■ 2. The Future in Ruins: Thoughts on the Temporality of Infrastructure — Haun Park (Hyperobject Team)

  • The 14th Empowerment Reading Seminar

    Date & Time: Wednesday, 19 August 2026
    13:00 ~ 15:30
    Text: Pinnix, A., Volmar, A., Esposito, F., & Binder, N. (2023). Rethinking Infrastructure Across the Humanities. transcript publishing.
    Section VII: Infrastructures and Colonialism
    ■ 7.1 Canals & Clans: Mediterranean Infrastructures — Bomi Lim (Ethos Team)
    ■ 7.2 Imagined Infrastructures: Eurafrica and Worldmaking in the Mid-Twentieth Century — Johaeng Rho (Text Team)
    ■ 7.3 Imperial Roads and the Fascist Culture of Total Mobilization — Miae Lee (Hyperobject Team)
    Section IV: Infrastructures and Religion
    ■ 4.1 Spiritual Infrastructures — Haun Park (Hyperobject Team)

  • The 13th Empowerment Reading Seminar

    Date & Time: Wednesday, 22 July 2026
    13:00 ~ 15:00
    Text: Pinnix, A., Volmar, A., Esposito, F., & Binder, N. (2023). Rethinking Infrastructure Across the Humanities. transcript publishing.
    Section VI: Infrastructures and the Environment
    ■ 6.1 Water for a Good Government: Andean Infrastructures in Guaman Poma de Ayala's Chronicle (1615) — Miae Lee (Hyperobject Team)
    ■ 6.2 The Dangers of Infrastructure Byproducts and What We Can Learn From Muriel Rukeyser's "The Book of the Dead" — Bomi Lim (Ethos Team)
    ■ 6.3 Afrofuturist Infrastructure as Allegory: Picturing Sustainability in Wanuri Kahiu's Pumzi (2009) — Yeonhee Woo (Text Team)

  • The 12th Empowerment Reading Seminar

    Date & Time: Thursday, 25 June 2026
    13:00 ~ 15:40
    Text: Pinnix, A., Volmar, A., Esposito, F., & Binder, N. (2023). Rethinking Infrastructure Across the Humanities. transcript publishing.
    Section V: Infrastructures and Genre
    ■ 5.1 Infrastructural Poetics — Myungsim Yang (Text Team)
    ■ 5.2 Queering Infrastructures of Romance — Myungsim Yang (Text Team)
    ■ 5.3 Counting the Impacts in the Solar Off Grid Sector — Yeonhee Woo (Text Team)
    Section III: Infrastructures and Sociality
    ■ 3.3 Infrastructures of Democracy: Lewinian Group Dynamics and the Management of Social Change (1930s-1940s) — Injin Woo (Ethos Team)

  • The 11th Empowerment Reading Seminar

    Date & Time: Wednesday, 27 May 2026
    12:30 ~ 14:30
    Text: Pinnix, A., Volmar, A., Esposito, F., & Binder, N. (2023). Rethinking Infrastructure Across the Humanities. transcript publishing.
    Section IV: Infrastructures and Religion
    ■ 4.1 Spiritual Infrastructures — Haun Park (Hyperobject Team)
    ■ 4.2 Infrastructure of Faith: Some Considerations on Correspondence in Late Antique Christianity — Ilman Choe (Hyperobject Team)
    ■ 4.3 Religious Infrastructure: The Parish Church — Seojin Oh (Text Team)

  • The 10th Empowerment Reading Seminar

    Date & Time: Wednesday, 29 April 2026
    10:00 ~ 12:40
    Text: Pinnix, A., Volmar, A., Esposito, F., & Binder, N. (2023). Rethinking Infrastructure Across the Humanities. transcript publishing.
    Section III: Infrastructures and Sociality
    ■ 3.1 Command and Consilium: On Infrastructures of Decision-Making in Roman Culture — Hyojin Jeon (Ethos Team)
    ■ 3.2 Couple Apps as Relationship Infrastructures — Injin Woo (Ethos Team)
    ■ 3.3 Infrastructures of Democracy: Lewinian Group Dynamics and the Management of Social Change (1930s-1940s) — Seojin Oh (Text Team)
    ■ 3.4 Conflicting Infrastructures: Ideological vs Social Infrastructures in Transmediterranean Communications of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries — Taehee Kim (Hyperobject Team)

  • The 9th Empowerment Reading Seminar

    Date & Time: Wednesday, 25 March 2026
    14:00 ~ 16:00
    Text: Pinnix, A., Volmar, A., Esposito, F., & Binder, N. (2023). Rethinking Infrastructure Across the Humanities. transcript publishing.
    Section II: Infrastructures and Communication
    ■ 2.4 On the Symbolic Infrastructure of Face-to-face Communication in Early Modern Society: Simple Success Media — Hyojin Jeon (Ethos Team)
    ■ 2.1 Language as Infrastructure — Haun Park (Hyperobject Team)
    ■ 2.2 Conceptual Infrastructure and Conceptual Engineering — Johaeng Rho (Text Team)
    ■ 2.3 Practices of Classification: The Hashtag as Infrastructure for Interaction — Hongsuk Yoon (Ethos Team)

  • The 8th Empowerment Reading Seminar

    Date & Time: Wednesday, 28 January 2026
    13:30 ~ 16:00
    Text: Pinnix, A., Volmar, A., Esposito, F., & Binder, N. (2023). Rethinking Infrastructure Across the Humanities. transcript publishing.
    Section I: Introduction
    Agenda - A General Ontology of Infrastructure
    ■ 1.1 Introduction — Taehee Kim (Hyperobject Team)
    ■ 1.2 From Structure to Infrastructure: Some Glimpses on a Theoretical Movement in the Social Sciences and Humanities — Ilman Choe (Hyperobject Team)
    ■ 1.3 From Systems to "Infrastructuring": Infrastructure Theory and Its Impact on Writing the History of Media — Hongsuk Yoon (Ethos Team)

The Empowerment Reading Seminar

JUN 26, 2025 - DEC 31, 2025 / #1106, New Millennium Hall, Konkuk University

Through the study of major works in the humanities and social sciences on infrastructure, this course aims to establish the theoretical foundation for research in infrastructural humanities.

  • The 7th Empowerment Reading Seminar

    Date and Time : 31 DEC (Mon) 14:00~16:00

    Topics

    The operation of infrastructure and the ideology of empire
    Colonial literature and the infrastructure of empire
    Nationalism and resistant readings of literature
    The aims and methods of distant reading

    <Text Team Presentation>

    Davies, D. (2017). Introduction: Infrastructure, resistance, literature. In Imperial infrastructure and spatial resistance in colonial literature, 1880–1930 (pp. 1–55). Peter Lang.

  • The 6th Empowerment Reading Seminar

    Date and Time : 24 NOV (Mon) 10:00~12:00

    Topics

    Promise vs. Anticipatory Infrastructure

    <Ethos Team Presentation> 

    Appel, H., Anand, N., & Gupta, A. (2018). Introduction: Temporality, politics, and the promise of infrastructure. In N. Anand, A. Gupta, & H. Appel (Eds.), The promise of infrastructure (pp. 1–38). Duke University Press.

  • The 5th Empowerment Reading Seminar

    Date and Time: OCT 27 (Mon) 10:00~12:00

    Topics

    Presentation and discussion of papers by each subproject team
    Recognizing infrastructure as an ethical field that can expand the scope of moral consideration within the dynamics of relational arrangements
    Understanding that the extension of urban agriculture to the non-human realm demands considerations of equity, justice, and sustainability, and that traditional ethical theories should be supplemented with outcome-based evaluative frameworks to visualize distributed and deferred harm and to design accountability

    <Hyperobject Team Presentation>
    Kanoi, L., Koh, V., Lim, A., Yamada, S., & Dove, M. R. (2022). What is infrastructure? What does it do?: Anthropological perspectives on the workings of infrastructure(s). Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability, 2(1), Article 012002.

    <Ethos Team Presentation>
    Epting, S. (2016). The moral dimensions of infrastructure. Science and Engineering Ethics, 22(2), 435–449.

  • The 4th Empowerment Reading Seminar

    Date and Time: SEP 29 (Mon), 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM

    Topics

    1. Presentation and discussion of papers by each sub-project team

    2. Exploring infrastructure as a sociotechnical ecosystem that materializes power and inequality through mechanisms of access and exclusion; foregrounding the background by reexamining infrastructural inversion and the materiality of the digital; investigating participatory interventions of social scientists in processes of design, standardization, and governance.

    3. Understanding infrastructural violence as the point where abstract orders—such as the state, law, and citizenship—are materialized through devices that organize suffering and inequality via active design and passive exclusion/disconnection; recognizing an analytical framework that extends responsibility from individuals to collective and structural dimensions, suggesting paths for practical intervention.

    <Hyperobject Team>
    Slota, S. C., & Bowker, G. C. (2017). How infrastructures matter. In U. Felt, R. Fouché, C. A. Miller, & L. Smith-Doerr (Eds.), The handbook of science and technology studies (4th ed., pp. 529–554). The MIT Press.

    <Ethos Team>
    Rodgers, D., & O'Neill, B. (2012). Infrastructural violence: Introduction to the special issue. Ethnography, 13(4), 401–412.

  • The 3rd Empowerment Reading Seminar

    Date and Time: SEP 1 (Mon), 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM

    Topics

    1. Presentation and discussion of papers by each sub-project team
    2. Review of key concepts for understanding infrastructure as an actor-relational structure, and exploration of possible methods, indicators, and case outlines for applying these concepts to research in the humanities of mobility infrastructure.
    3. Recognition of the agenda’s expansion—from mobility to infrastructure—through discussions of the definitions and methodologies of infrastructure.

     

    <Presentation – Hyperobject Team>
    Larkin, B. (2013). The politics and poetics of infrastructure. Annual Review of Anthropology, 42, 327–343.

    <Presentation – Text Team>
    Star, S. L. (1999). The ethnography of infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist, 43(3), 377–391.

  • The 2nd Empowerment Reading Seminar

    Date and Time: AUG 4 (Mon), 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM

    Topics

    1. Presentation and discussion of papers by each sub-project team
    2. Discussion on the validity of Bruno Latour’s concept of the Parliament of Things
    3. Discussion on the position and role of the concept of infrastructure within the Humanities of Infrastructure

     

    <Presentation – Hyperobject Team>
    Adey, P., Lee, J., Peterle, G., & Rossetto, T. (2024). Mobility, infrastructure, and the humanities. Mobility Humanities, 3(1), 1–17.

    <Presentation – Text Team>
    Bridges, M. (2023). The infrastructural turn in historical scholarship. Modern American History, 6(1), 103–120.

  • The 1st Empowerment Reading Seminar

    Date and Time: JUN 30 (Mon), 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM

    Topics

    1. Presentation and discussion of papers by each sub-project team
    2. Discussion on infrastructure as both an object and a methodological lens in the Humanities of Infrastructure
    3. Discussion on the scope and boundaries of infrastructure

     

    <Presentation - Text Team>
    Lee, J. (2024). Infrastructure as a socioecological backbone network, for ecological histories. Concept and Communication, 33, 317–354.

    <Presentation - Ethos Team>
    Koo, D. (2025). The specter of neoliberalism in infrastructural spaces: A critical examination of neoliberalism's mobility that leads to liberalization and marketization. Society and Theory, 50, 179–211.

    <Presentation - Hyperobject Team>
    Kim, T. (2025). Climate–infrastructure in the Anthropocene: From the perspective of infrastructure humanities. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Infrastructure Humanities (pp. 33–51).