Just Released: 'Material Crimes' New Episode
Take a deep dive into the infrastructural crimes that shape the lives of colonised, racialised and marginalised communities everywhere – and how they are mobilising for different, liberated futures.
Material Crimes is a podcast project dedicated to uncovering the “true crimes” of infrastructure.
The series explores how infrastructure is made by global systems of colonialism and capitalism, yet experienced and contested in local and everyday ways.
Working with researchers, activists and communities, the series threads together archives, interviews, music and the voices of those living at infrastructure’s sharpest edges.
Each episode follows the trail of a different infrastructural crime, with its own particular history. But whether the focus is a detention centre, a railway or a mine, in the Israeli military-prison complex or along a military road in Georgia, the stories in these episodes are always connected to global histories of conquest, resource extraction, and profit.
New episodes released weekly - beginning with Episode 1: Stop That Train
“But didn’t colonialism give them railways?” The “Cape-to-Cairo” railway was meant to stretch from Africa’s southern tip to Egypt in the north. It was the unrealised fantasy of an unruly cast of imperial hustlers, including most infamously Cecil Rhodes. As Dom Davies traces the legacy of this unfinished railway across Africa, he finds that tracks of colonial plunder, resource extraction, and white supremacy continue to haunt the continent.
Talking to Adam Elliott-Cooper, Megan Jones, Uhuru Portia Phalafala, Sara Salem, and Jonny Steinberg, Dom explores the violence of the Cape-to-Cairo railway as both a symbolic and material crime. Using songs and poetry of resistance, he also unravels how fantasies of a connected Africa energised successive generations of activists, from Black Consciousness poets to Rhodes Must Fall.
Dom Davies is Reader in English at City St George’s, University of London. His research connects infrastructure to histories of empire and nationalism and explores its representation in literature and visual culture. He is also convenor of the Thinking Through Infrastructure Network (TTiN), which brings academics together with policy makers and organisers to ask how practices in the arts and humanities can build community and justice around sites of infrastructure failure.
Coming up in Season 3…
The ISRF has supported the production Material Crimes Season Three through a discretionary award to series’ co-creators and co-directors Maia Holtermann Entwistle and Sharri Plonski (Queen Mary University of London).
Season Three is mixed and sound designed by felix taylor and Carla Flores. Visuals, website and installation are designed by Frederick Kannemeyer. Nivi Manchanda (QMUL) provided production support and expertise.