Introduction to Special Section ‘Infrastructures of Injustice: Migration and Border Mobilities’

ABSTRACT

This Special Section interrogates the interrelationships between mobilities infrastructures and notions of injustice across multiple empirical settings regarding regimes of migration and border movements of peripheralized communities. Most readings of infrastructure imply fixity and permanence and suggest neutral mediations of mobility. This collection, in contrast, examines how, in fact, infrastructural forms interpret, translate and paraphraseand and in doing so, generate plural possibilities of injustice and justice. Through extending debates in relation to the interaction of human and tangible infrastructures, we interrogate how this dimension is key in understanding the materialization of injustice today, both within and across international borders. Interrogating these interconnections has implications not just for the steady international streams of marginalised labour migrants and immigrants, but also for increasing numbers of refugee populations seeking asylum and work across borders. In bringing conceptualizations of injustice to anthropocentric understandings of infrastructure, to generate more ontologically inclusive understandings of laws, bureaucracy, borders and networks of international mobility as central actors in shaping possibilities for justice, as well as entrenching or exacerbating existing forms of inequality.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration infrastructures
• injustice
• border mobilities
• mobility justice
• mobility politics
• migration industry

Introduction

This Introduction sets an agenda for understanding the role of mobility infrastructures in the creation and perpetuation of ’plural’ modes of injustice and inequality. This project is imperative in an era where infrastructures have been co-opted by governments informed by exclusionary politics, often to deter and detain immigrants, obscure the rights of refugees and obfuscate the responsibilities of the state.

While media and much academic attention has rightly focused on the plight of the migrant ‘victims’ and failures of powerful elites within these unequal alignments, the technologies and infrastructures that enable such forms of injustice have yet to be closely explored as collusive actors within these larger configurations of power. Although recent attention to migration infrastructures within the wider migration literature has rendered them less of a ‘blackbox’ (Lindquist, Xiang, and Brenda 2012) whose inner logics and machinations are rendered opaque, they remain understood primarily as neutral intermediaries within a fragmented and self-adjusting process.

In this Special Section, we contend that these very mediations have not been adequately examined through the lenses of power, hierarchy and domination. This Introduction suggests that the mediatory nature of mobility infrastructures generates contradictory temporal, spatial and discursive effects, which in turn enable ontologically plural possibilities for justice or injustice in peripheralized communities.

Papers in this collection examine a range of infrastructural forms, including national laws and policies designed to exclude differently ‘raced’ Others from formal belonging in the nation, colonial island legacies of factories and houses that enable the reproduction of paternalistic relations between locals and refugees, and multiple temporal discourses that render a shared conception of the future impossible for African migrants to Europe and within South Africa’s cities. In tracing the interventions of these various mobility infrastructures, we demonstrate that they are not ‘neutral’ but are in fact complicit in the institution of social injustices and inequalities that characterize contemporary migration and border mobilities. Emphasizing the ethical complexities and normative implications of such processes, the papers here demonstrate that a purely material examination of mobility infrastructures is inadequate in understanding effects on itinerant populations and their role in imagining more just futures.

This Special Section takes transnational mobility infrastructure as a site that discloses different meanings attached to notions of (in)justice. The implications of this for migration and mobility regimes concern exposing their contingent nature, hence showing that assessments of their success or failure in producing just and equitable outcomes are subjective and context-specific. Moreover, the agency of mobility infrastructures can be seen as reconfiguring polities, currently and over time, creating and potentially entrenching outcomes and socio-technical arrangements that deliver (in)justice unevenly across populations. These dynamics, however, cannot even be acknowledged, let alone redirected towards better outcomes, so long as mobility infrastructures are understood as merely inert and value-neutral background, for this rules out even looking at what difference they make to issues of (in)justice.

Issues of (in)justice need not be abandoned as purely subjective and relative and hence no longer capable of bearing critical public argument-. Rather, what is needed is for greater responsibility to be assumed for the explicit consideration of the dynamic and mutual inter-relations between mobilities infrastructures and issues of (and even concepts of) (in)justice, incorporating a wider range of subjective responses and experiences in that assessment than is the current norm. This Special Section aims to illustrate the insights available from adopting this approach.

Infrastructural (in)justice

The populations of international migrants, refugees and the border communities who constitute the ethnographic subjects of this set of papers are embedded within multiple material infrastructures, as well as more intangible forms of ‘infrastructure’, such as social networks and internationally circulating humanitarian discourses. The qualitative methodologies employed in this collection of papers allows for deeper excavations of complex social, cultural and historical contextuality, and for developing locally responsive and embedded conceptualisations of (in) justice.

Infrastructure’s ability to cross national borders and span continents makes it a highly suitable transnational object of inquiry. A focus on infrastructural elements then allows for understandings of injustice that are more amenable to structural analyses that are not curtailed by the nation-state-centric frameworks that still constitute much migration methodology (Amelina and Faist 2012). Simultaneously, because infrastructures also divide and prioritise geographically proximate groups, they expose the ways in which unjust outcomes are locally and materially differentiated.

In the papers in this Special Section, infrastructure is collectively experienced, whether by communities of migrants, refugees or transient workers. In this way, it is at once the technical entity of engineering-dominated common sense and a constituting regimes and logics of movement. This understandingsocial entity, generating shared experiences and possibilities. The mediatory nature of such ‘infra-structure’ in producing the social exposes the inter-dependence of migration and contemporary mobilities processes explored in this Special Section.

In exploring how infra-structure linkes to injustice, we build upon and draw on notions of structural violence (Farmer 2004), where inequalities and injustices are systemic, not dependent on individual volition or action. This perspective allows for understandings of injustice that look beyond the specific role of governments, agencies, individuals or corporations. The papers in this Special Section are interested in the connections and possibilities, but also disjunctures and discontinuities, that infrastructure configures. In delving into the relationship between migration, mobility infrastructure and injustice, we are especially interested in explorations of how flows of bodies, information and objects are governed, reconfigured, restricted, and facilitated.

This Special Section sits at the intersections of growing scholarship on ‘migration infrastructure’ (Xiang and Lindquist 2014) and ‘mobility justice’ (Sheller 2018). It follows the former’s approach in maintaining an empirical focus on constitutive elements of the larger system of international movements, but the latter’s adoption of a perspective of relationality of power in constituting regimes and logics of movement. This understanding draws much from Latour’s (2005) ‘sociology of association.’ In particular, the distinction that is drawn between ‘mediators vs. intermediaries’ is crucial here in interrogating the work that mobility and migration infrastructures do. The original opposition between the terms is productive to recount here:

An intermediary, in my vocabulary, is what transports meaning or force without transformation: defining its inputs is enough to define its outputs. For all practical purposes, an intermediary can be taken not only as a black box, but also as a black box counting for one, even if it is internally made of many parts. Mediators, on the other hand, cannot be counted as just one; they might count for one, for nothing, for several, or for infinity. Their input is never a good predictor of their output; their specificity has to be taken into account every time. Mediators transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry. (Latour 2005, 39)

Following from this, infrastructures are conceptualized as ‘objects’ that are involved in mediation, and mediatory activity, within the processes of migration and border mobilities. In this way, they don’t just make a teleological connection, but massage, morph and mould outcomes. Infrastructures are not neutral intermediaries and translators but have an effect on social, material and political outcomes as they are involved in the regulation, facilitation, and dissolution of mobilities.

Correspondingly, if a primary role of such objects in social relations is to stabilize them, then what is the role of infrastructure in stabilizing social orders that are unjust? In discussing empirical examples of such social and political orders, this collection understands infrastructures as complicit and implicit in conditions of injustice, and in doing so suggests ‘infrastructures injustice’as a mode of identifying such configurations. In this reading, infrastructures do not merely reflect or regurgitate unjust social orders, but are actively enrolled in their making. This remaking work that infrastructures do in mediating mobility is dynamic and ongoing.

The papers in this collection do not, however, suggest that injustices are enacted through only infrastructural means, or that injustice is experienced or perceived in uniform ways. The examination of different empirical contexts, geographical locations, and consideration of a wide range of infrastructural objects, institutions, actors and relations, demonstrate the ontologically diverse and relationally constituted nature of injustice.

In the following sections of this Introduction, the literatures on migration and mobility infrastructures, as well as writings about injustice, are reviewed, briefly drawing out the conceptual innovation of ‘infrastructural injustice’. Then, the papers constituting this Special Section are introduced. Finally, the conclusion uses the example of the handling of the coronavirus pandemic in Singapore as a reminder of the possibilities for both social good and injustice simultaneously in infrastructural mediations.

Infrastructure, migration & mobility

Infrastructure is imperative for mobility. However, most notions of infrastructure invoke images of material stasis and permanence. In recent years, with an increased focus on infrastructure in disciplines of geography and anthropology in particular, a growing amount of research has sought to dismantle such limiting propositions, and understand their relationship with migration studies and the mobilities literature more broadly. In this realm, one strand seeks to expand the initial conceptualizations of migration infrastructures, focusing on specific aspects like brokerage practices (Shrestha and Yeoh 2018; Lindquist 2018), highlighting how this facet dominates labour migration within Asia in particular, and overwhelmingly shapes the ways in which the majority of low wage migrants move.

The bulk of this work is situated within the ‘Asian infrastructural turn’ (Shrestha and Yeoh 2018), which has focused on the intermediaries who facilitate circulation of both low wage and middle class migrants within the continent. Other work discusses how various perspectives of and elements of international mobility function together in the ‘migration industry’ (Cranston, Schapendonk, and Spaan 2018) and in producing or constraining movement or immobility.

This body of work, while alluding to networks of power and manifestations of inequality, is more attuned to the how of migration, rather than focused on ways in which inequality and injustice are embedded within and mediated by infrastructural elements as a central concern. Furthermore, much of this literature is centered around movements in East and Southeast Asia.

The papers in this Special Section draw from empirical investigations in Central Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and the Pacific, bringing what were previously more Asian-centric epistemes to wider geographies. In broadening the focus of the literature on mobility infrastructure to include the mobility and forced stasis experiences of refugee and asylum seeking populations, this Special Section extends understandings of infrastructure’s role not just in mediating journeys of already mobile groups, but also in shaping the possibilities for both social and physical mobility for communities who seek to migrate but who cannot move out of place. Building on understandings of uneven spatial effects of connection and disconnection that infrastructures create, the papers in this collection additionally conceptualise infrastructures as also instituting important temporal and discursive effects.

In these articles, the effect of infrastructures on our understandings of transnational migration and mobility can be seen in three interrelated realms. First, echoing much of the earlier research in this realm (as discussed above), infrastructures are seen as effecting changes in the ways we understand space and territory, problematizing notions of nation-states and national boundaries. Infrastructures connect and make invisible borders, as we see in Schwiter and Chau’s analysis of temporary female migrants in Central Europe. These may allow for movements that are liberating, but also render those very mobilities exploitable, as in Sieger’s examination of mother and child migration from the Philippines.

Secondly, in temporal terms, infrastructures are shown to have the ability to stretch or condense time, both effects alluded to in Morris’s depictions of offshore refugee processing centres. This elasticity is mediated through both material infrastructures of buildings as well as the exceptionality of the island of Nauru as part of, but simultaneously separate from, the Australian nation-state. Similarly, lasting temporal effects of mediated forms of infrastructure in Suferling and Leurs’s paper demonstrate the continued renewal of older unequal social relations and hierarchies between refugees and citizens.

Thirdly, discursive effects of intangible infrastructural forms are discussed as less understood, but equally significant, parts of the larger logics of transnational mobility infrastructure’s function to sort, regulate and define migrant bodies. Internationally circulating humanitarian discourse, to which both Morris and Landau refer in their contributions, is also shown to shape infrastructure as temporal and spatial configurations. These time-space configurations construct possibilities of movement not just within sub-Saharan Africa, but also between (imagined) world regions of Europe and Africa.

Conceptualising injustice

Injustice as an analytic and philosophical conception, while regularly invoked to describe situations and instances where justice is lacking or where an unjust act has taken place, is also surprisingly a relatively unexplored notion in conceptual isolation in this field. The existing scholarly work that directly engages with this idea can be loosely divided into two themes. The first involves arguments in favour of taking injustice as a concept on its own terms, instead of assuming it falls naturally out of an account of justice.

relatively unexplored notion in conceptual isolation in this field. The existing scholarly work that directly engages with this idea can be loosely divided into two themes. The first involves arguments in favour of taking injustice as a concept on its own terms, instead of assuming it falls naturally out of account of justice.

The political theorist Judith Shklar argues against philosophy’s standard treatment of the notion of injustice. While the reality of injustice is certainly acknowledged here, it is treated ‘merely as the take-off point for a wholesome and upbeat theory of justice,’ a theory which is treated as the real goal of the philosophical enterprise (1990, 19) in establishing an egalitarian and fair set of relations. Instead, she urges that injustice be taken more seriously as a distinct (even if related) concept, with its own distinctive appearances in normal use. For example, she suggests that paying attention to differences in how even the same event is deemed simultaneously as injustice by some (suggesting culpability) and as merely a misfortune by others (absolving responsibility) can provide sharp insight into the complexity of ethical life. Injustice is not just experienced relationally, but also perceived as ontologically plural.

Eric Heinze (2012) makes a different case for taking the concept of injustice seriously. He argues that there is a ‘partial incommensurability’ (46) between justice and injustice, where the lack of justice does not necessitate injustice, just as the lack of injustice does not necessarily constitute justice. While there still remain some overlapping cases where the absence of one would in fact be considered the presence of the other, there is still good reason to inquire about injustice in addition to justice, rather than assuming that inquiring about one will suffice (Heinze 2012, 45–9).

The second theme takes for granted that thinking about injustice is important and then occupies itself with attempting to delineate distinct ideal types of injustice using case studies. Consider, for instance, the cases of: Miranda Fricker’s ‘epistemic injustice’ (2007) which describes the neglect or discrediting of discourses and statements by certain groups because of negative social stereotypes and associations; Katherine Jenkins’ ‘ontic injustice’ (2020) where injustice is enacted through being socially constructed as belonging to a certain ‘social kind’, such as gender; Madison Powers and Ruth Faden’s ‘structural injustice’ linking human rights to less well-defined notions such as fairness and well-being (2019); and Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ ‘cognitive injustice’ (2014), which critiques narrow Western-centric frames of justice based on definitions of human rights.

Thinking about injustice, however, does not need to restrict itself to moral judgements of individual people’s actions. Following Langdon Winner’s argument that ‘machines, structures, and systems of modern material culture can be accurately judged … also for the ways in which they can embody specific forms of power and authority’ (1986, 19), we can even think about the ways infrastructures can reasonably thought to be unjust. Winner’s own example (drawn from Robert A. Caro’s biography) of how Robert Moses constructed particularly low overpasses to discourage public transport to Jones beach, since they typically ferried poor and black people, serves as a striking example. Perniciously, such decisions do not simply disappear with Moses himself, but endure as ‘a way of engineering relationships among people that, after a time, became just another part of the landscape’ (Winner 1986, 23).

Some caution, however, is in order since injustice can’t simply be read unambiguously off the world. Even the story of Moses’ racist bridges is now contested (Campanella 2017), drawing attention to how difficult real-world judgements can sometimes be. Some work has tried to emphasize this complexity, pointing to how tricky naming and analysing injustice with precision can be. For example, Watts and Hodgson (2019, 10) aptly caution against seeing real-world injustices as one-dimensional and instead point to how these are instead:

contingent on a complex interplay between philosophical and political arguments about human nature, rights, moral principles, and political and economic theories. It includes historical and cultural forces associated with structural and sociological conditions, and it includes psychological attitudes and dispositions that condition and shape belief, general outlook, and interpersonal conduct and behaviours.

Watts and Hodgson remind us that ultimately there is no easy algorithmic method to identify injustice. Instead, the messiness of the world will always have to be reckoned with.

In proposing the notion of infrastructural (in)justice, this Introduction draws from these multiple strands of work, seeing injustice not just as the corollary of justice but also suggesting that understanding the role of infrastructural elements within mobility and migration processes provides unique insight into the shaping of ethical and moral futures, as demonstrated in the above discussion of three infrastructural effects.

In proposing the term ‘infrastructural injustice’, it is neither the aim of this Special Section nor this Introduction to invent or re-invent conceptualisations that describe the injustices that could be engendered through infrastructural means. Notions such as ‘infrastructural violence’ (Rodgers and O’Neill 2012), ‘infrastructural power’ (Mann 2008) and ‘infrastructural warfare’ (Graham 2004) all lend themselves to the perspective that material as well as immaterial forms of infrastructure have the potentiality to facilitate violence, dispossession, and act as key players in generating unequal outcomes, especially for marginalised or peripheralized groups in society. The absence and deprivation of infrastructure has also been conceptualized as a form of infrastructural ‘violence’ (Datta and Ahmed 2020). Yet this Special Section brings those considerations into conversation with the literature on migration infrastructures (Xiang and Lindquist 2014), which has thus far largely seen infrastructure as intermediary, with less attention paid to its propensity for exploitation or promise of social justice.

The papers in this collection also thus speak to notions of ‘mobility justice’ (Sheller 2018), understanding migration and the mobilities that characterize border movements as inherently constitutive of power and politics, rather than merely constituted by them. An important insight that Sheller’s work brings to understandings of injustice within the realm of migration infrastructures is their dynamic, shifting and contingent nature. Time, and the passage of time,shapes and influences our understandings of infrastructures effects, and what injustice is considered to be.

Building on these ideas, the papers here demonstrate that the ethics of what is just or unjust are relationally determined, contextually dependent and ontologically plural. Just as infrastructures are situated within, and shaped by, specific cultural, economic, historical and political logics, so too injustice is defined and experienced in contextually specific and ontologically unique ways (Kathiravelu 2019).

It follows that defining injustice (or justice) in any authoritative form for studies of migration and mobility is not possible within the scope of the Special Section. Instead, the papers here explore and rely on what injustice and, by extension, justice, means for specific migrant and borderland communities and the societies in which they are embedded, and which they traverse across. This does not imply, however, that injustice is not collectively experienced. Drawing from de Sousa Santos’ (2018) conceptualisations of a globally inclusive notion of cognitive and epistemic justice, this collection situates its interventions into discussions of socio-spatial justice in a space beyond Western-centric notions of human rights, instead embracing broader non and post-colonial ontological pluralities.

The papers in this Special Section likewise pluralise notions of injustice, exploitation and dispossession, taking different ontological forms depending on socio-political but also historical context, as the previous discussion of the three infrastructural effects illustrates. Forms of injustice, exploitation and dispossession have come to be normalized in many discussions of peripheralized communities where structures of race, class and gender amongst others interpellate individuals and groups into positions of marginality. A focus on infrastructure adds another perspective to such understandings, shedding light on how injustices and inequalities are engendered and enacted. This exposes the constructed nature of such processes, dismantling the notion that any given form they take is inevitable.

The papers

All the papers in this Special Section show how an attention to infrastructures enables us to unpack the undergirding of the seemingly naturalized ways in which mobility functions. Flows of people across international borders in the contemporary era are demonstrated to be reliant on a matrix of infrastructural webs and scales that intersect and produce different social justice outcomes across geographical and discursive time and space. The role of infrastructures, as this Introduction has argued, is more than to enable or restrict movement, but in doing so implicates mobile people and processes within regimes of moral value and worth.

Julia Morris’s exploration of the lasting infrastructure of colonial artefacts that morph into refugee infrastructure in Nauru expands our understandings of infrastructure through a temporal lens. She illustrates how refugee processing facilities engender unequal and exploitative social relations embedded within global agendas of international aid. Couched within the performative rhetorics and materialities of humanitarian justice, infrastructure naturalizes divisions within the population, rehearsing colonial modes of segregation and disrupting possibilities of inclusive sociality. Set in the southern island nation of Nauru, but also intimately located within the trajectories of asylum seekers from many other parts of the global south, this paper is an example of how injustice in so-called humanitarian projects, enabled by infrastructural relics, is largely ignored or made invisible, particularly to the ‘northern’ or western gaze of Australians. The material infrastructures that Morris describes are part of a larger assemblage of stasis complicit in social divisions and international mobilities being held in a state of suspension.

Notions of time as stretched and injustices as delayed are also apparent in the work of Seuferling and Leurs, work which demonstrates the links and continuities in classification and ordering systems across different eras, targeting exclusions at various refugee and mobile populations, but through similar mediated technologies. The authors read media and migrant infrastructures intersectionally, and reveal the underpinnings of infrastructural imaginaries of efficient ordering, administration and bureaucratic limitations imposed on selective bodies. They trace the genealogy of deployment of media technologies in migration and refugee governance and dissect the ways in which biological and biographical information is inscribed into documents that are ultimately employed in disciplining displaced and discriminated populations. Their paper demonstrates powerfully the capacity of a seemingly descriptive classificatory schema to inscribe value on individuals that ultimately determines who belongs and who does not.

These papers point to the importance of understanding how violence and injustice can be ‘slow’ (Nixon 2011), rendering them less immediately visible, yet often resulting in more lasting, unjust and exploitative outcomes. As Nixon points out, these (infrastructural) developments are not seen as engendering violence, but often only as bureaucratic organizational means that manage mobile populations. The temporality of injustice is rendered latent through its modulation over long periods. The recognition of these latencies is important in seeing links to the more immediate and visible ways in which these specific infrastructural forms endure and recreate unjust structures.

Chau and Schwiter’s paper describes how the legal institution of visa-free movement between Switzerland and European Union accession states allows for the perpetuation of injustice through increasing precaritisation and exploitation of female low-waged care workers. In the absence of state-controlled infrastructure, borders move ‘inward’, and private actors such as migration brokerage agencies now have new powers to determine who and under which conditions workers migrate. Liberalisation and removal of physical barriers to mobility have rendered borders invisible, and labour increasingly temporary, disposable and dependent on the unmonitored ethics of intermediaries. In response, migrants draw on immaterial infrastructures of transnational social networks, not just to maintain relations with family back home, but also with informal brokers and middlemen agents for advice on how to deal with difficult patients and emotional support in situations where they are often isolated, without a physically proximate support network.

Fiona-Katharina Siegel’s paper on cross border mobilities of Japanese-Filipinos and their mothers also takes up the significance of intermediaries, one that other papers in this collection have also highlighted. In striking similarity to the empirical case taken up by Chau and Schwiter, here too, the institution of new legal infrastructure places increased responsibility on commercial migrant brokers who utilize regulatory loopholes and humanitarian rhetoric to craft a new labour supply for Japanese factories, construction sites and care facilities. In appealing to notions of morality, justice and rights, however, advocacy-based NGOs and agencies that facilitate mobility replicate structural inequalities and exploitative international relations that initially ensured the exclusion of migrant Filipino women and their offspring. In both these papers, the privatisation of the bureaucratic and legal infrastructures of cross-border mobility enables new forms of mobility, but simultaneously ensures that these migrations are severely limited in their claims to the nation and citizenship thereof.

Loren Landau demonstrates, on the other hand, how existing infrastructure could allow for the passive accommodation of different Others within a space that is claimed as one’s own. In this important conceptual extension of the notion of migration infrastructures, Landau argues that justice is only possible and achievable within a shared recognition of space-time show [/NBS] or chronotopes. Competing chronotopes then signal incommensurable justice outcomes between international and domestic migrants, citizens and foreigners. This exploration of social time and its relationship to notions of true hospitality and welcome are situated within multiple scales of movement, oriented towards urban Johannesburg, and out of continental Africa. Both engender exclusions that are predicated on a justice that is spatially and temporally elsewhere.

These discussions blur the clean divide between Rodgers and O’Neill’s (2012) characterization of infrastructural violence as ‘active’ or ‘passive’. This distinction refers to the intentionality of infrastructure, where it is designed to be exclusionary in the former, ‘active’ case, and not so in the latter even as it may inevitably produce consequences that are unjust. Papers by Sieger, and Chau and Schwiter suggest that infrastructures of migration law and state policy, or their absence, can actively (but perhaps inadvertently) constitute unjust outcomes; for example, by placing restrictions on children of Japanese fathers in seeking citizenship and employment in Japan.

Conclusion: COVID-19 simultaneity and plurality of infrastructural injustice

The very infrastructures that enable the mobilities of people and material objects, as discussed in this Special Section, are also responsible for the movement and spread of the coronavirus. The planetary impact of this pandemic is intrinsically intertwined with the movements of people and the material and immaterial structures that enable them. The rapid acknowledgement of this has meant that mobilities themselves have ‘come under attack’ (Cresswell 2020). Migration infrastructures of borderlands, brokerage and bureaucracy have also become complicit in dismantling and discouraging mobility, with uneven effects across populations.

The ways in which SARS-CoV-2 has spread has exposed inequalities across the globe – both between and within nations. It has now been said countless times that the coronavirus does not discriminate regarding who it infects. In these representations, the virus itself is democratic, not able to distinguish between demographics of gender, ethnicity, nationality, immigration status or socio-economic class. Yet, the ways in which the effects of the pandemic have been felt have exposed and exacerbated injustices across the world. This is a reflection of the unequal structures that characterize and divide societies, but also the mediatory potential of infrastructures that are implicated in unequally distributed information, medical care, and state resources.

In Singapore, where I am writing this Introduction, the role of physical infrastructure that is central to the migrant economy of low wage construction, shipyard and maintenance work became the key site for the coronavirus outbreak. Migrant worker dormitories that house hundreds of thousands of low-wage migrant men, primarily at the peripheries of the city, presented the most viable dense and tight conditions for the rapid spread of the coronavirus. The lack of early state intervention in taming the outbreak amongst the low-wage marginalised community has now been repeatedly cited as a sign of the ways in which already existing inequalities were being exacerbated, and consequently, the pathologizing of certain mobilities (Lin and Yeoh 2020).

As a result of the early experiences with the pandemic, there has been a re-examination of the conditions under which many low wage migrants live and labour within the city-state of Singapore. Here, the material and social enclaving enabled through existing infrastructure is being strengthened in the interests of public health. Migrants are being moved to off-shore ‘floating dormitories’ as a further means of physical separation. Many are still unable to access any other parts of the city besides their places of work and board. This has prompted outcries from activists and the public about the unjust limitations on everyday movement and resultant mental health problems. The very technologies, logistics and infrastructures that segregate and exclude marginalized populations are also integral in containment and mitigation of epidemics.

Simultaneously, low wage migrant victims of the virus were also primary recipients of free high-quality medical care, quarantine and testing. They have also received vaccinations as a part of their adopted state’s extension of national health services to foreign citizens within its borders. Low-wage migrant men living in purpose-built dormitories are being acknowledged as needing larger living spaces with better sanitation and services. Resources are being channelled for their mental health needs and in building stronger social networks. However, for the individual migrant, being the recipient of such benefits of infrastructural change often also necessitates complying with the unchanging injustices of temporary migration regimes, unscrupulous employers and bonded labour, as they are still subject to migration regimes that privilege capital and are built on the economic inequalities between sending and receiving states (Chin 2019). Within understandings of injustice as ontologically multiple and contextually understood, justice then can ever be only partial and never complete.

Coming back to the discussions of the papers within the Special Section, we can see that infrastructural developments can institute both conditions of injustice, inequality and unfair discrimination, while also allowing for larger socially responsible outcomes. The ways in which infrastructures act as mediators transforms social conditions of mobile peoples and their environments. These transformations cannot be encompassed by understanding actions, laws or urban environments separately, but rather must be seen as part of larger interconnected and relational webs of materialized power and meaning. In particular, this Introduction sets out three interrelated realms of space/territory, temporality and discourse through which we can examine the plurality of infrastructural injustice. In acknowledging the complicity of infrastructures in subverting or cementing ethical futures for migrants and other mobile populations, the papers here urge for deeper interrogations of the agency, morality and politics of infrastructural processes and configurations, animated by notions of (migrant) rights, equality and justice.

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by Singapore Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 1 Grant ‘The Missing Link’. The author wishes to thank Sharad Pandian for research assistance provided and Pennie Drinkall for prompt administrative assistance. The author is also extremely appreciative of the editors Mimi Sheller and David Tyfield’s detailed engagements with the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).