Photo by Janke Laskowski via Unsplash
UBC has been awarded a €100,000 grant from the European Commission to establish the Jean Monnet Center for Excellence in Critical Infrastructure Studies. Housed within the Centre for European Studies, the new research hub explores how infrastructures—both physical and ideological—shape political, cultural, and social life across Europe and beyond.
In this Q&A, co-directors Dr. Katherine Bowers and Dr. Ervin Malakaj explain what Critical Infrastructure Studies is, why it matters now, and how the Center aims to challenge entrenched East/West divisions in the study of Europe.
For readers new to the concept, what is “Critical Infrastructure Studies” and what does it explore?
Dr. Katherine Bowers, Director, Centre for European Studies
Critical Infrastructure Studies (CIS) is an interdisciplinary area of inquiry that studies systems and their operations. It can examine the framework by which a town runs its day-to-day operations (e.g., sewage, energy, transit), a network of communication (e.g., postal service, telecommunication, news agencies), knowledge systems (e.g., education, museums, media), or information exchange (e.g., computing, cloud structures). CIS can also study how infrastructures of communication and ideological alignment inform foreign policy. Or it examines how, in the public sphere, commercial infrastructures shape consumer culture, while social infrastructures dictate how and in relation to whom people live their lives.
Dr. Ervin Malakaj, Associate Professor, Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies
Infrastructures address and shape the material conditions for living. Yet their forms often also abide by principles of design, appeal, and beauty. Consequently, infrastructures necessitate interdisciplinary approaches in order to attend to their various dimensions. Thus, our thematic focus on infrastructures is capacious enough to bring together scholars from various subfields in order to draw on their expertise to study them in detail.
What inspired the creation of this research centre, and what core questions will it seek to answer?
In a February 2023 speech, Vladimir Putin declared that Russia is “locked in an existential battle with the West.” This alleged struggle falls along a perceived East/West dichotomy, which has long proven extremely useful in the service of Russian nationalist and imperial ideologies. The distinction to which Putin alludes derives force from the assumption that “the West” is structured differently than “the East.” In this binary, the patterns of Western structures undermine the very existence of life in the East, which justifies forceful intervention against anything perceived as threatening the system he values.
“We want to develop methodologies for transnational infrastructure studies capable of thinking beyond East/West binaries.”
While Western commentators have established that Putin’s propagandistic rhetoric is generally self-serving, dangerous, and cannot be taken at face value, the persistent functionality of the East/West dichotomy in the Kremlin’s ideological repertoire is not just an “Eastern” phenomenon. The Putin quote above is just one example of a broader buy-in to a perceived East/West dichotomy that has informed political, social, economic, and cultural development and organisation across the discourse in the global north for centuries. In other words, Western commentators might reject Putin’s claims as bad ideology, but the West, too, belabours a distinction that actively casts “the East” if not outright as different in a way that threatens the existence of “the West,” then at least as a dubious space of difference that must be contained. Such assumptions foreclose any opportunity for the expression of solidarities or collaborations that might lead toward a less divided future.
The Jean Monnet Center at UBC will be housed inside the Centre for European Studies and will examine the processes and structures that enable this false dichotomy. In particular, we are interested in Critical Infrastructure Studies as a framework for understanding the interconnections that underpin the development of East/West aligned ideologies. In our assessment, such a framework has to be refined from existing scholarship on CIS, which has focused on regional or national contexts. We want to work with scholars at UBC and internationally to develop interdisciplinary methodologies for transnational infrastructure studies capable of thinking beyond East/West binaries.
Can you share some of the projects or initiatives the Center will launch in its first year?
There are three major areas of programming:.
- Research funding for Center members: The Center will support through grants and in kind support the research by members of the Center, which include UBC graduate students and faculty working in and across the humanities and social sciences with a vested interest in some area of European Studies relevant to the theme of the project. Research mobility grants will fund UBC scholarship with international partners.
- Programming: We will host a UBC speaker series to showcase UBC research aligned with the theme of the center, an international speaker series, professional development sessions for Center members, and roundtables featuring local policymakers and diplomats representing the EU in Canada. Some of these initiatives will be tied to the Center podcast, which we hope to launch next year.
- Preliminary work toward the reestablishment of the MA in European Studies: We seek to bring scholars and graduate students together interested in European Studies. The collective efforts of the core research members will be an invaluable resource as we try to pave the path toward reviving what used to be a thriving graduate program bringing humanities and social science scholarship to bear on graduate education in European Studies at UBC.
Looking ahead, what impact do you hope the Center will have—at UBC, in Canada, and internationally?
We hope the Center will first and foremost support UBC graduate students and faculty in advancing their scholarship and teaching in the area of European Studies. Second, we hope to facilitate the development of new methodologies that will help scholars and policymakers alike avoid binarization in their discussion of European topics. Ultimately, we seek to establish UBC as a major centre for interdisciplinary and transnational European Studies.
