The 2023 Neil Smith Lecture: Professor Deborah Cowen, University of Toronto Deadly Lifeworlds and Palliative Politics: Colonial Infrastructure and Beyond

Logistics has become the preeminent calculative science of the contemporary martial and corporate regime of motion. Frequent disruption of ports, canals, pipes, and rail lines catapults supply chain vulnerability to centre stage and makes more people more attuned to the baffling global geographic organisation of sustenance and social reproduction. And yet, the rise of an economy organised by complex, long-distance networks of ‘making and moving' has long fueled the colonial transformation of continental ecologies and so too the uneven politics of premature death.

Holding seemingly disparate sites of crisis together, in ‘Deadly Lifeworlds and Palliative Politics: Colonial Infrastructure and Beyond' Deborah Cowen, Professor in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto, will trace the active struggle over the materiality of life's motion through the logistics of pipelines, pigs and police, and follows its reach into the most intimate spaces, such as the very remaking of even the human microbiome.

What infrastructural inheritances usher in an era that might best be characterised as ‘palliative', and how might an immanent politics of care and collaboration point us towards other paths?