Infrastructure has been theorized not as neutral backdrop but as a deeply political force constituting the fabric of contemporary capitalism and state power, characterized by the uneven scaling of mobility, violence, and citizenship (Cowen 2014). It binds us to the world as ongoing movement, organizing not only the material reproduction of life but the sensorium through which that world is sensed and desired (Berlant 2016). Beyond visible materiality, infrastructure seeps into the ambiguous textures of subjective life, co-constituting experiences of gender, precarity, and futurity in ways that resist full legibility (Lesutis 2023). Spanning hard built environments and the human labor that animates them, infrastructure is also constituted by bodies, disproportionately those from marginalized communities, engineered to maximize life chances for highly resourced populations while disabling their own (Kim 2026).
To infrastructure vulnerabilities, then, is to ask how such arrangements are built, naturalized, and contested within and across borders. Vulnerabilities, our panel argues, are not intrinsic to particular bodies but woven into the durable arrangements of everyday life, and its exposure unsettles not only the exploitative political economies that infrastructure serves but the foundational categories of governmentality, sovereignty, and legitimacy, upon which those arrangements depend.
Our session will be structured around four ten-minute presentations, with Howard Chiang serving as respondent. Chiang will introduce all panelists and facilitate the fifteen-minute discussion with panelists and the audience. All panelists will upload their materials to a shared online folder via Box, accessible to all attendees.
Our session begins with Ala Uddin, whose ethnographic study of Rohingya refugees in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, grounds our inquiry in one of the most acute humanitarian crises of our time. Uddin argues that humanitarian infrastructure, despite its protective mandate, stratifies the very populations it claims to shelter through camp planning, legal frameworks, and mobility controls, while refugees creatively circumvent these systems through informal networks, foregrounding the contested and relational nature of infrastructural power.
Nelson Jiajie Meng turns to Singapore’s postcolonial “Garden City” to examine how urbanizing infrastructure simultaneously exploited and erased the drag queen community of Bugis Street, whose performances sustained the tourist economy the state profited from. Tracing gender-nonconforming labor across inter-Asian media circuits connecting Singapore and Hong Kong, Meng argues that visibility itself became political terrain: managed, exported, and ultimately demolished in service of a modernity that could not acknowledge what sustained it.
Nan Wang examines China’s Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture as a critical infrastructure of memory and belonging, reading two novels by Joseonjok writer Heo Ryeon-sun to trace how historical upheavals and shifting national boundaries destabilize ethnic minority attachments to homeland. Han cultural hegemony, socialist ideology, and border governance render Joseonjok identity perpetually vulnerable to erasure, leading Wang to propose a rethinking of diaspora that embraces rupture and ambivalent belonging as constitutive features of life at the political margins.
If the preceding papers reveal how infrastructure produces vulnerabilities as an ambient condition, Yen-Jen Chen asks what that condition, paradoxically, makes possible. Introducing the concept of “targeted subjectivation,” Chen theorizes how Taiwan and Hong Kong navigate asymmetric imperial threat not as passive objects of sovereign reclamation but as polities whose subjectivity is formed precisely because empire must aim at something in order to negate it. Infrastructure here does not only disable; it becomes the terrain on which a fractured yet irreducible political subjectivity is constituted.
Responding to all four papers, Howard Chiang will bring his expertise in science and technology studies, Sinophone studies, and queer theory to bear on the panel’s cross-regional scope, asking what the transnational production of vulnerabilities demands of our theoretical and methodological frameworks.
Moving across Bangladesh, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China, the panel maps how infrastructure distributes vulnerabilities unevenly along lines of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in ways that exceed any single sovereign jurisdiction. Infrastructuring vulnerabilities is thus a method: a way of reading across borders, disciplines, and scales to trace how vulnerabilities are built into the ordinary, contested from within, and transformed, at the limit, into the ground on which new subjectivities and solidarities emerge.