From critique to hope: Infrawalking, defamiliarisation, transgressive infrastructuring and utopian engineering

This article explores how methodological innovation can move media and infrastructure studies from critique toward hope. Building on the infrastructural turn in media studies, we argue that research must go beyond diagnosing power asymmetries to co-creating utopian alternatives that centre people and planet over capital and control. Drawing on experiments from the critical infrastructure lab, we reflect on four methods: infrastructure walks, transgressive infrastructuring, defamiliarisation, and utopian engineering. In these methods, we swap the pairs of infrastructure/governance, discourse/materiality, and values/objects in order to cultivate alternative technological trajectories, thereby unsettling assumptions that current technological developments are inevitable. Rather than treating infrastructures as closed systems, these approaches invite participants, including researchers, policymakers, activists, artists, and industry actors into collaborative processes of relational knowledge production. We argue that such methods embody ‘utopia as a method’ by creating spaces of uncertainty and experimentation that render infrastructures visible, contestable, and reconfigurable. In doing so, they generate not only critique but also openings for collective utopian agendas in an attempt to co-develop alternative infrastructural futures that centre people and planet over capital and control.