A series of interviews on infrastructures

Guilt and Debt in Capitalism with Bogdan Popa

Making peace by making war? with Vijay Prashad

PART I

PART II

Security infrastructure - between public and private with Ruxandra Ivan

Fortress Europe - Border Regime in Europe Today with Klaudia Wieser & Nidžara Ahmetašević

PART I

PART II

Work and migration in Romania with Ioana Simina Popescu

The magic of money with Anca Bidian

The Price of Living with Enikő Vincze

On Fire. Brand Magazine and the workers’ struggle in Sweden with Viktor Mauritz

Leipzig - a logistics capitalist love affair with Hans Stephan & Elisabeth Reckmann

Care in Crisis with Letizia Bonanno

BONUS: Abundance Games - about infrastructures, computer games and the climate crisis with Linia Verde

Guilt and Debt in Capitalism with Bogdan Popa

In this debut episode, we discuss a few films from the so-called Romanian New Wave, debate ideas about perception in capitalism, and how guilt and duty underlie the experience of self and pave the way for privatization. An atypical discussion about infrastructure where roads, bridges, canals, logistics centers, etc. are understood as both material and immaterial at the same time.

BIO

Bogdan Popa is a theorist and scientific researcher with a keen interest in film, and in particular in Romanian film, which he approaches from a Marxist and queer perspective. He is the author of numerous studies and books, including Sex and Capital - a Theory of Romanian Film; Shame - a Genealogy of Queer Practices in the 19th Century; De-centering Queer Studies: Communist Sexuality in the Flow During and After the Cold War and many others. Until recently, he organized a series of performative reading workshops called Save the Theory at the Bucharest Museum of Literature. He currently works as a scientific researcher at Transylvania University in Brașov.

Making peace by making war? with Vijay Prashad

PART I

The second episode of the series talks about the connection between the economy and militarization in Europe. There are also hints to the politics of militarization in Romania and to the expansion of NATO bases in Eastern Europe. The strong political consensus about rearming Europe is discussed and given a broader historical context.

BIO

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian and journalist. He is the author of forty books, including Washington Bullets, Red Star Over the Third World, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, and Tw sa he Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power, written with Noam Chomsky. Vijay is the executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, the chief correspondent for Globetrotter, and the chief editor of LeftWord Books (New Delhi). He also appeared in the films Shadow World (2016) and Two Meetings (2017).

PART II

In this episode the strong political consensus about rearming Europe is further discussed in relation to the concept of freedom of speech, while the discussion touches upon the role of infrastructure in connection with the Belt and Road Initiative initiated by China and the Recovery and Resilience Plan initiated by the European Union.

Security infrastructure - between public and private with Ruxandra Ivan

This episode discusses private armies and their impact on international politics since the 1990s, the problems that private armies raise, issues of human rights violations, dubious dealings with private corporations, lack of transparency, etc. It also discusses the influence of the privatization of the army in the Black Sea region and the policies in Romania.

BIO

Ruxandra Ivan is a lecturer at the Faculty of Political Science of the University of Bucharest, where she teaches courses on international politics, Romanian foreign policy, theories of international relations and European Union politics and coordinates the Master in International Relations. She has published over 40 articles in specialized scientific journals and 11 volumes, authored or in collaboration, of which the most important are: La politique étrangère roumaine, 1990-2006, (Ed.), New Regionalism or No Regionalism? Emerging Regionalism in the Black Sea Area, London, Ashgate, 2012 (reissued Routledge, 2016); (Ed.), “Transformarea socialistă”: politici ale regimului comunist, între ideologie și administrație, 2009.

Fortress Europe - Border Regime in Europe Today with Klaudia Wieser & Nidžara Ahmetašević

PART I

Divided into 2 parts this episode explores the detention infrastructure in the context of the so-called migration management put in place by the European Union. The inhumane ways in which migrants are treated by the institutions of force – police, border guards, Frontex and others - come to light among deportations, push backs, detention centers, protective walls, surveillance technologies. There is also talk about the imperialist use of legislation by the EU core countries in relation with countries that want to access the Schengen area - that is: how the accession is conditional on the implementation of security measures against migrants.

BIO

Klaudia Wieser is a scholar whose focus lies on the historical entanglements of liberation movements within war and migration studies, with a special focus on Palestine. She is a founding member of the border monitoring initiative Push-Back Alarm Austria, a 24-hour hotline for people on the move crossing into Austria, and a board member of Dokustelle Austria, a documentation and counseling center on Islamophobia and Anti-Muslim Racism in Austria.

Nidžara Ahmetašević is an independent researcher and award-winning journalist and author of the book “The Media as a Tool of International Intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina: House of Cards”, published by Routledge. Her fields of interest are democratization and media development in a post-conflict society, hate speech, transitional justice, media and political propaganda, human rights and migrations. Her work has been featured in various media in the Balkans, as well as the New Yorker, Al Jazeera, The Observer, The Independent on Sunday, the International Justice Tribune, Der Spiegel, The Guardian and Rolling Stone, among others.

PART II

This episode explores the ways in which European imperialism resurges through and around anti-migration politics. Also discussed is the use of legislation by the EU core countries in relation with countries that want to access the Schengen area - that is: how the accession is conditional on the implementation of security measures against migrants.

Work and migration in Romania with Ioana Simina Popescu

The episode discusses the labor migration infrastructure in Romania, the conditions that led to the increase in the number of migrant workers in Romania, the pressures at the legislative level that employers exert to maximize the benefits of using migrants as cheap labor, and the similarities and differences between Romanian migrant workers who left to work in Western Europe and migrant workers in Romania.

BIO

Ioana Simina Popescu graduated with a master's degree in sociology and social anthropology from the Central European University in Vienna with research on labor migration from Asia to Romania. Her thesis is titled They Came Here to Work. The Production of Precariousness and Irregularity within the Migration Infrastructure in Romania.

The magic of money with Anca Bidian

BIO

Anca Bidian founded 21 years ago the first credit brokerage firm in Romania, a company that quickly became a leader and market shaper.

The Price of Living with Enikő Vincze

PART I

Divided into two parts, this episode begins explorations on the housing regime or the principles by which people live in Romania today, developing the analysis around concepts such as rentier capitalism and others. There is talk about the privatization of former industrial platforms inside large cities in Romania, about energy poverty, i.e. households that cannot afford the costs of heating, electricity, hot water, etc.

BIO

Enikő Vincze is the initiator of the Social Houses NOW! movement as well as of the informal national network of public intellectuals Socialist Vision, being involved in national and international struggles for housing justice. Enikő is a retired professor from academic activity at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj where she worked as a researcher in urban development, real estate and housing, and is the author of several books, including: Militant Epistemologies 2014-2024: Ten years of activism and militant research for housing justice (frACTalia) and the collective volume Unequal Real Estate Development in Romania at the Crossroads of Deindustrialization and Financialization (Routledge).

PART II

This second episode talks about the impact we can expect from the European (EU) Affordable Housing Plan, inaugurated with much fanfare in 2024. It also debates ideas related to decoupling profit from housing and and different different non-capitalist visions for housing are put forth.

A New Frenzy? The Extreme Right in Romania with Adina Marincea

PART I

The episode presents the causes of the rise of the extreme right in Romania since the Covid pandemic. The conversation sheds light on some key concepts regarding Romanian fascism such as: incitement to hatred, hate culture, discrimination, suprematism, extremism. Also debated are the reasons why Romanian law is ineffective in preventing the spread of far-right ideas in the public space and the rhetorical strategies used by far-right groups.

BIO

Adina Marincea is a researcher at the National Institute for Holocaust Studies in Romania "Elie Wiesel", holds a PhD in Communication Science and a post-doctorate on the rebirth of interwar legionary Manichaean thought through the discourse of the ideologists of the right-wing populist party AUR. Her analyses published in the central press bring to light both the far-right, anti-Semitic or Holocaust-denying discourses and manifestations, as well as the network of organizations that promote racist, xenophobic, hate-inciting visions.

PART II

On Fire. Brand Magazine and the workers’ struggle in Sweden with Viktor Mauritz

This episode presents Sweden's oldest anarchist magazine, founded more than 100 years ago. The conversation revolves around the relationship the magazine establishes with its readership and how magazines with a radical emancipatory content, such as Brand, can contribute to the labor struggles in Sweden.

BIO

Viktor Mauritz is a member of the editorial collective Brand.

Leipzig - a logistics capitalist love affair with Hans Stephan & Elisabeth Reckmann

This episode discusses the logistics industry in the city of Leipzig in East Germany, the impact large companies such as Amazon and DHL have on the inhabitants in the city and on the work conditions there. Addressed are also the responses of the workers, activists and city dwellers who organized strikes and other actions in order to stop the logistics expansion. As a recurring question which always comes back during the discussion is the role of the union in the context of capital operating transnationally.

BIO

Elisabeth Reckmann is 33 years old and active in the Climate Justice Movement for 9 years. She studied Sociology at the University of Jena and works in the extracurricular educational sector. She wrote her thesis about different perceptions of the expansion of the cargo airport Leipzig-Halle.

Hans Stephan is writing a PhD-thesis about working conditions and labour union strategies in logistics warehouses. His focus lies on the logistics cluster Leipzig. He is also engaged in the network Amazon Workers International.

Care in Crisis with Letizia Bonanno

This episode discusses how the citizens of Athens organized in the midst of the economic crisis (2015-2017) to overcome the lack of access to medicines (Athenian social clinic of Solidarity KIA). Different strategies deployed by the population in economic austerity regimes are listed and explained. Also consequences of the austerity measures such as the uneven access to medical services in the periphery are addressed, while the situation in Gaza is briefly discussed from the point of view of the health system and the differences to austerity regimes in Southern and Eastern Europe.

BIO

Letizia Bonanno earned her PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Manchester in 2019. Her doctoral work, titled "Pharmaceutical Redemption: Reconfigurations of Care in Austerity-laden Athens," looked at the emergence of grassroots medical facilities during the peak of the 2009 economic crisis. Since completing her PhD, she has held teaching and research posts at various British academic institutions. Letizia has played an active role in the ongoing conversation around multimodal and graphic anthropologies and has extensively published on the epistemological and methodological affordances of graphic ethnography. Since September 2024, she works as a senior research fellow at the department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna. She has recently received the SEED grant to develop her new research project on industrial labor and post-industrial futures in Taranto (Italy) and Galati (Romania). Both at the margins of Europe and their respective states, since the 1960s Taranto and Galati have hosted the biggest and most polluting steel plants in Europe. Her project, tentatively titled "Steel Life," aims to understand the tensions between environmental and labor struggles through the lens of social reproduction, thus bringing a feminist perspective into current debates around industrial labor.

BONUS: Abundance Games - about infrastructures, computer games and the climate crisis with Linia Verde

The episode, which launches www.infrastructuri.ro, is an open discussion about the climate crisis and the depoliticized ways in which it is addressed in public. Two of the members of the Green Line project answer Pervasive Infrastructure questions, which leads the discussion towards infrastructures and utopia, computer games and forms of organization within cultural projects and beyond.

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