Holy Infrastructures: Notes on Catholicism and the Elementals

Guest lecture by Professor Valentina Napolitano (University of Toronto).

Through an ethnographic focus on the Catholic church at the Detroit/ Windsor borderland (USA/Canada) this talk explores elemental forces as water, soil, and air — as an entity that constitutes part of the (theo)political and religious forces of holy infrastructures. Thus they can and should be studied as infrastructural flows that are oriented by an incarnation of a divine mediated through urban, theological and labour scales, in both (dis)enabling as well as racialized forms.

Funded by the Velux Foundation & Centre for Comparative Culture Studies