A network that invites you to think through infrastructure – energy, transport, water, waste, housing, health – with methods from the arts, humanities, & social sciences.
Infrastructure bears the weight of the past and orients the future. TTiN is a network for academics, policy makers, community organisers, and interested citizens who think through these temporalities and work with infrastructure to confront challenges and possibilities in the present juncture.
Listen back to recordings of previous events and the network's ongoing series of podcast conversations: TTiN recordings | SoundCloud.
From housing and transport to sanitation and energy systems, TTiN understands infrastructure as the foundational and often contradictory material that unevenly distributes vital resources, including not least the resource of life itself. It sees infrastructure as the site where forms of oppression are reproduced and contested, and where new kinds of liberation might be fought for and realised.
Though engaged with its technical and economic underpinnings, TTiN refuses a deterministic approach to infrastructure and pays close attention to its social, cultural, imaginative, and emotional aspects. Network participants think about infrastructure, but they also think through infrastructure to ask how it shapes lived experience, and to consider how this both curtails and enables our politics.
TTiN values methods from the arts and humanities alongside the social sciences, experimenting with activities from zine-making to comics co-creation to build community and think differently about infrastructure. It is committed to creating an intelligent and accessible space where specialists and non-specialists can reimagine together what infrastructure is, how it operates, and who it serves.
Past TTiN activities have been funded by a Higher Education Innovation Funding (HEIF)/Knowledge Exchange Grant and a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant, as well as internal grants from the SCC Impact Support Fund and the SASS Research Reboot Fund.
The network logo and posters are designed by Kremena Dimitrova.
TTiN is convened by Dom Davies, a Reader in English in the School of Communication and Creativity. Its steering group includes academics from other City schools, from universities in the UK and Europe, and non-academics from organisations such as the Greater London Authority. This diversity of disciplinary and professional backgrounds is reflected in its members and event attendees.
Dr Dominic Davies
Dominic Davies, with Kremena Dimitrova, BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant, 2024-2026
Community energy projects (CEPs) present an efficient and cost-effective way of rolling out green energy infrastructure across the UK. From rooftop solar to rural heat networks, CEPs produce clean energy and keep costs low for vulnerable users. They also empower communities by bringing people together and giving them control over the essential infrastructure they need to live their lives. Yet uptake in England has been relatively slow, and research into the challenges has hitherto centred on government policy.
By contrast, this project will research the lived dimensions and firsthand experiences of those involved in delivering community energy through the medium of comics. By hosting two comics co-creation workshops with participants in CEPs and enabling co-production through collaborative research methods, this project will generate a digital graphic narrative designed to reveal existing obstacles to CEPs and provide a practical, human-centred guide for communities that are interested in starting new projects.
Dominic Davies, Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF), 2024-2025
In recent decades, a critical turn to infrastructure across the humanities and social sciences has taken place at the same time as the infrastructures of emancipatory knowledge production have been steadily annexed, disciplined, and dismantled.
In response to this paradox, this project asked: how do we reorganise our knowledge infrastructures in the service of collective liberation? How can we know in disobedient ways that are empowering, not overwhelming? As the enclosure of academic research intensifies, what should we urgently fight for and try to salvage? Where is the future of radical knowledge production?
The project understood infrastructures as subtending arrangements that make some ways of knowing possible while foreclosing others. It counted university buildings as infrastructures, but it also included libraries and unions, as well as the lived relations mediated through these institutions, from diminishing research time and precarious labour contracts to overflowing inboxes and managerial reward systems. It set out to challenge the confusion of value with price that has utterly transformed knowledge production, and to share insurgent practices of knowing from both inside and beyond university spaces.
In the spirit of its inquiry, the project adopted an experimental knowledge-making format, including the circulation of a booklet of position papers used to underpin themed and participatory discussion, and collaborative sessions in which participants co-produced a zine that reimagines the infrastructures of radical knowledge production.
Reed Puc, PhD Thesis, 2022-2026
This thesis explores how portrayals of New York City in Spider-Man comics, movies, and videogames have developed through the neoliberal period, from the 1960s to the 2010s. It sets out to show how the Spider-Man franchise has reproduced – but also occasionally contested – the white spatial imaginary of New York, which has itself shifted with the city's uneven development and regeneration throughout this period.
To achieve this, the thesis approaches Spider-Man through an abolitionist prism that departs from current trends in graphic justice criticism and related writing on comics, the city, and the police. With this abolitionist critique, it shows how Spider-Man resolves white anxieties around the racialised city by reproducing carceral narratives of safety and autonomy, while also seeking out moments from across the Spider-Man universe where different conceptions of justice, power, and responsibility are articulated.
Dominic Davies, with Kremena Dimitrova, SCC Impact Support Fund, 2023-2024
This project explored how methods in the arts and humanities can help us to rethink what infrastructure is, what it looks and feels like, and its development and provision, particularly as these have been constructed through histories of empire and colonialism in Britain. Ranging from housing and transport to sewers and energy grids, the project understood infrastructure as the everyday materials that enable (or, when they fail, prevent) people from living their lives.
It's aim was to allow participants to “reimagine infrastructure” through knowledge exchange and by using methods from the arts and humanities. It connected people working as academic researchers, community organisers, policy makers, and service providers.
It included contributions from the UK's first Infrastructure Humanities Group, based at the University of Glasgow; a session with the Portland Inn Project, who use the arts to build community-led infrastructure in Stoke-on-Trent; an “ethno-graphic” workshop led by Kremena Dimitrova, where participants will rethink infrastructure through drawing and arts practices; and a final reflective session featuring panel discussants with different knowledge specialisms.
Dominic Davies, with Sunjay Mathuria, SASS Research Reboot Fund, 2021-2022
We are currently living through a global infrastructure revolution. From Joe Biden’s billion dollar infrastructure plan and China’s belt and road initiative to calls for a Green New Deal, economic investment in infrastructure has moved centre-stage. Nowhere is this more evident than in Britain and Northern Ireland, where the current Conservative government has centred their post-Covid recovery plan on the much touted “levelling up” agenda. Originally a nineteenth-century neologism used by Victorian engineers, today this phrase appears in the mouths of ministers, regional mayors, green activists, and even celebrities.
This project set out to facilitate an open and cross-disciplinary discussion of the cultural narratives and political imaginaries that are invested into infrastructure in Britain today. How is infrastructure bound up with Brexit and Britain’s post-imperial identity? What political work is the “levelling up” agenda doing in the wake of Covid-19? And what might a different imaginative, cultural, and political programme for infrastructure look like, and from where might this emerge?
The network hosts speakers and activities throughout the year, meeting both online and in person.
For updates on forthcoming events follow @TTinfraNetwork on Instagram and Bluesky or contact Dom Davies to be added to the network’s mail list.
, 17:30 – 19:00 ( BST )
The Pool, College Building, Northampton Square Campus, City St George's, University of London
Marianna Dudley will be discussing her recent book, Electric Wind: : An Energy History of Modern Britain (Manchester UP 2025).
, 09:30 – 11:30 ( BST )
Walmer Castle Court, 102 Peckham Road, London
Join us for a guided walking tour exploring Peckham’s Caribbean heritage, meeting at 9.30am for a 10am start.
Speakers: Charmaine Brown, Anna Minton, Betty Owoo, Ash Rao, Eleesha Taylor-Barrett
With Filippo Menga, Naho Mirumachi, and Julie Froud
Friday, 13th June 2025
Workshop
Thursday, 27th February 2025
with Rhys Williams
Wednesday, 27th November 2024
with Julie Froud, Sukhdev Johal, and Justin O’Connor
Friday, 1st July 2022
Workshop
The TTiN podcast, which includes recordings of network events and interviews with academics and artists, is available on Soundcloud, Apple, and Spotify.
Dominic Davies and Nicola Kirkby on, ‘Minerals Online Roundtable: Extraction, Infrastructures, Networks | Soundcloud,’ UCD Humanities Institute, 17 October 2024,
Dominic Davies on Novara FM, ‘Britain’s Infrastructure is Crumbling: Can Labour Fix it?’, Novara Media, 4 July 2024,
Charmaine Brown on ‘Gentrification Revisited,’ BBC: Thinking Allowed, 21 September 2022
Charmaine Brown on ‘Peckham Heritage,’ Grow Our Histories, South London Gallery
