‘Infrastructures of Hope and Resilience: Governing Uncertainty’ - Opening Lecture by David Chandler

Tuesday, 14 October 2025, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. | Ukraine Lecture Series | GD HS08 | Infrastructures are key to understanding how systems - whether individuals, communities or societies - respond, prevent, ameliorate or adapt to crises. The key point of this lecture is that how we understand infrastructures has expanded to include less visible and graspable aspects of internal relations, aspects which are often not apparent until after the fact. Questions of infrastructural resilience bring to the fore concerns of uncertainty, unknowability, and opacity, and therefore expose the limits of traditional policymaking and policy understandings. Two villages, two individuals, two firms, may appear very similar in all their key aspects but may respond very differently to external disturbances or crises. This gap between appearances and reality provides a space for rethinking problems and possibilities. In a world of uncertainty, resilience increasingly reworks traditional approaches to hope - no longer restricting hope to discrete outcomes held to be uncertain but possible. Hope increasingly becomes enrolled in discussions of behavioural attitudes or dispositions, of modes of being in the world, modes that are not necessarily calculated and goal-directed but rather are adaptive, processual and open-ended.

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