685743

research-article2016
VCU0010.1177/1470412916685743journal of visual culture<bold>Brennan</bold> Visionary Infrastructure

journal of visual culture

Visionary Infrastructure: Community Solar Streetlights

in Highland Park

Shane Brennan

Abstract
This article develops the concept of ‘visionary infrastructure’, defined
as infrastructure that provides visions of and begins to build more
sustainable futures for local communities, through the case study of
a solar-powered street lighting project in Highland Park, Michigan,
near Detroit. After the local utility company repossessed most of
the city’s streetlights, residents began building their own grassroots
public lighting network. This infrastructure is visionary because
it allows members of the largely African American community to
determine precisely how their city is illuminated, and thus how
seeing operates therein. By shifting control over the conditions of
urban visuality from state and corporate officials to local residents,
the lighting project intervenes in a long history of light on the
street as a racialized tool of state surveillance and policing. And it
shows how utility infrastructure can become a key site and mode of
contemporary political resistance.

Keywords
community practice • infrastructure • public lighting • race • solar
energy • sustainability • urban space

The relationship between utility infrastructure and the visual has most often
been conceptualized in terms of infrastructural visibility or invisibility: the
ways in which critical infrastructures such as power lines, cell towers, and
fiber-optic cables enter or exit the space of everyday cultural perception.
Sometimes these networks and their component parts are deliberately
concealed, as in the cables and pipelines that snake beneath city streets;
journal of visual culture [journals.sagepub.com/home/vcu]
SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC and Melbourne)
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Vol 16(2): 167­–189 DOI 10.1177/1470412916685743
https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412916685743
168   journal of visual culture 16(2)

other times they fade from view through a gradual process of cultural
normalization. In parts of the developed world where infrastructures are
robust and function (more or less) reliably, many users tend to lose sight
of the visible systems upon which they rely, such as the street grid itself, or
the lights and signals that enable its navigation.1 As several researchers have
observed, the sudden failure or breakdown of infrastructure can cause it to
momentarily snap back into view. The ‘normally invisible quality of working
infrastructure’, writes anthropologist Susan Leigh Star (1999: 382), ‘becomes
visible when it breaks: the server is down, the bridge washes out, there is a
power blackout.’ As it disables many other systems, from lighting to digital
media and communications, electrical outages may be the paradigmatic
form of infrastructural failure that, paradoxically, generates new modes of
visibility. ‘The arrested moment of each blackout provides a snapshot of the
electrical system and of social relationships’, observes historian David Nye
(2010: 2). ‘People notice electricity only in its absence’ (p. 12).
But as I propose in this article, this is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of
how infrastructure engages the visual. Infrastructures are not only objects
or assemblages of objects that are seen or not seen, visible or invisible,
noticed or unnoticed. In certain contexts, infrastructure can be a vehicle
for visionary thinking – that is, a tool for reimagining not just how a
particular utility or support system operates, but also broader shifts in the
social politics surrounding the production and distribution of essential
resources, including light, energy, and electrical power. Such a visionary
infrastructure, to suggest a phrase, is taking shape in the majority African
American town of Highland Park, surrounded by the city of Detroit. After the
utility company removed and dismantled most of the town’s streetlights in
the midst of a financial crisis, a non-profit organization named Soulardarity
formed to install solar-powered lights that are collectively paid for, owned,
and controlled by local residents in the model of a sustainable lighting
cooperative.
At one level, these solar lights help restore a missing, critical service,
meeting the urgent need for light on the street, for public visibility, for
being able to safely navigate one’s surroundings at night. But on another,
deeper level, they exemplify visionary infrastructure, a concept developed
out of on-site research and interviews with key individuals behind
Soulardarity. For some residents and project organizers, the community-
generated solar lights are much more than sources of illumination; they are
visible objects with which Highland Parkers can imagine a series of scalar
transformations: first, a transformation in how public lighting operates, then
a transformation in the larger energy economy, and finally a transformed city
that is more livable, equitable, and environmentally sustainable. Expanding
scholarly understandings of infrastructure’s relation to the visual, visionary
infrastructure speaks to the ways that ‘activist’ or ‘alternative’ infrastructures
not only produce viable alternatives to existing infrastructural systems, but
can also foster processes of rethinking a broader spectrum of social and
political relationships, including those among the state, utility providers,
and energy consumers, and between mostly white figures of corporate or
 Brennan 
Visionary Infrastructure  169

governmental authority and communities of color. In short, rather than

asking whether or not and under what conditions we see infrastructure
(infrastructural visibility), I want to ask both how infrastructures of lighting
enable and shape seeing (what might be called infrastructural visuality)
as well as how certain infrastructures can lead one to imagine the world
differently (visionary infrastructure).
The concept of visionary infrastructure draws upon Detroit-based activist and
philosopher Grace Lee Boggs’ (2011: xxi) notion of ‘visionary organizing’, a
mode of revolutionary organizing that, she writes, ‘begins by creating images
and stories of the future that help us imagine and create alternatives to the
existing system’. Along similar lines, visionary infrastructure is infrastructure
that not only provides a service, such as public light, but also generates
powerful ‘images and stories of the future’ that facilitate the imagining of
systemic alternatives, for example an alternative energy system powered
by renewable energy from the sun, rather than fossil fuels, and controlled
by and responsive to the needs of community members, rather than utility
corporations and the state. Any alternative infrastructure has the potential
to be visionary if it not only seeks practical solutions to the production
and delivery of resources, but also contains a vision for correcting racial,
economic, and environmental injustices – for social as well as material
transformation at the infrastructural level. While the concept contains some
degree of generalizability, the Soulardarity project has a special capacity
to illustrate visionary infrastructure because it deals so intimately with the
various dimensions of the visual. By generating light, what Sean Cubitt
(2014: 1) has called ‘the condition of all vision’, streetlights shape urban
visuality: who can see what, where, when, how, and whom can be seen (or
not seen) in the city at night.2
This article explores the visual and political complexities of the Soulardarity
project in order to work toward a deeper understanding of infrastructure’s
relationship not just to visibility and invisibility, but also to visualization and
imagination. It argues that attending to these dimensions of infrastructure is
critical to appreciating the social, cultural, and political impact of Soulardarity’s
practice, as the streetlights they are installing provide a material platform for
reimagining both the economics of the energy system and the racial politics
of how light and vision are orchestrated in urban space.
The article begins with an overview of the case study: section one describes
the lighting repossession, and section two focuses on Soulardarity’s
response in the form of its initial streetlight installations. Having laid
this foundation, the third section unpacks how the Soulardarity project
functions as a visionary infrastructure for its organizers and community
of participants. Turning again to Boggs’ theory of ‘visionary organizing’,
I break out two distinct yet overlapping operations within visionary
infrastructure: convening community and imagining alternatives to existing
utility systems and their attendant social politics. The fourth section places
the community infrastructure project in a deeper historical context in order
to show how Soulardarity departs from older, state-run systems of lighting.
170   journal of visual culture 16(2)

Here, I build on existing scholarship that defines light on the street as

not only a way of controlling the boundary between light and dark, but
also a form of social control over urban populations – a way of ordering
people along with perception in the nocturnal city. This includes work by
Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1988), who theorizes public lighting as a technique
and technology of surveillance and identification, one that played a key role
in the evolution of modern policing, as well as Simone Browne’s (2015)
crucial observation that light on the street also historically served as a mode
of racialized oppression, part of a regime of top-down, compulsory, and
disciplinary illumination that forced black and indigenous urban residents
to remain constantly visible to authority. Soulardarity is subverting this
longstanding racial and power dynamic by giving Highland Parkers the
ability to determine precisely where and how their city is illuminated, and
shifting control over the conditions of urban visuality from the hands of the
state and energy company to the hands of the community.

1. The Repossession of Light and Visibility

In August and September 2011, contractors hired by the local power
company, DTE Energy (formerly Detroit Edison) drove block-by-block
through Highland Park, ripping lampposts from the ground.3 More than1,300
were removed, roughly two-thirds of the city’s former complement. In a
video captured by Highland Park resident Paul Lee, two contractors are
seen decommissioning a light in front of his house on Massachusetts Street
with almost choreographed efficiency (Lee, 2011). First, they lower a rope
from a large crane mounted on a flatbed truck that is parked along the
curb. Then, one of the contractors clips the rope to the lamppost before
quickly unbolting the post from its base. While his partner operates the
crane to lift the severed post onto the truck bed, laying it down beside
several others, the first contractor uses a pair of bolt cutters to trim the dead
electrical cables sticking out of the ground. They secure the streetlights
in the truck, then hop aboard and drive away. Lee’s camera follows the
truck as it disappears down the street before turning back and zeroing in
on the concrete base in the grass: a kind of accidental monument to this
now-absent infrastructure. Taking all of eight minutes, the process is both
mundane and shocking; it echoes the visual discourse of maintenance and
repair work that city-dwellers encounter on a near-daily basis, while also
representing the dramatic reduction of a public utility that has been part of
the Western urbanized experience for roughly a hundred years. In a few,
swift gestures, Highland Parkers were being deprived of their right to light.
By filming the event and posting the video online, Lee expanded the visibility
of the repossession beyond the geographic confines of Highland Park. It is
a kind of infrastructural visibility that differs drastically from that produced
by breakdown or failure, such as the transformer explosion and subsequent
blackout that call attention to the electrical system during a severe storm.
Here, the focus is not on the collapse of some inanimate system, but on the
human figures and agency of the contractors as they carry out DTE’s orders.
 Brennan 
Visionary Infrastructure  171

It is less the infrastructure itself that is rendered visible in the video, in

other words, and more the conscious, calculated decision to dismantle it –
permanently. This decision was the outcome of an agreement between city
officials and the power company after Highland Park had been unable to
pay its electricity bill in full for several years, accumulating a supposed debt
of roughly four million dollars. DTE agreed to forgive the debt in exchange
for being able to repossess most of the streetlights (Davey, 2011). Ironically,
getting the city ‘in the black’ financially meant letting many of its streets
become literally pitch black.
Nights in Highland Park became more than twice as dark, but the darkness
was not evenly distributed. While most streetlights at intersections and along
high-traffic corridors were preserved – or in some cases even brightened
with new LED fixtures – almost all mid-block lights were removed. This
evidences a clear prioritization of cars (motorists) over people (residents
and pedestrians). Although perhaps less crucial for maintaining traffic flow,
mid-block lights provided vital illumination for the people who lived around
them, brightening sidewalks, driveways, and front yards as well as streets.
In their absence, the only light on many blocks comes from relatively dim
porch lights that homeowners leave on overnight to mitigate concerns
about safety and crime, and the headlights of passing vehicles. ‘I go down
my street with my high beams on in my car’, remarks Nandi, who runs
a hybrid café, bookstore, and community space in Highland Park (2015,
personal communication). ‘I always enjoy a full moon’, she adds, ‘because
you get some light from a full moon.’4 Although it is only about five miles
from downtown Detroit, Highland Park now had a level and quality of
illumination more commonly found in rural environments.
This is a stark reversal from the Highland Park of decades past. At the turn
of the 20th century, the Detroit satellite was an epicenter of automotive
manufacturing, home to both the Ford Model T facility where the company
debuted the moving assembly line, opened in 1910, and Chrysler’s world
headquarters, founded soon thereafter. A steady influx of living-wage jobs
caused the population to skyrocket from a few hundred around 1900 to more
than 50,000 by the 1930s, making Highland Park one of the fastest-growing
cities in the US, with solid municipal infrastructures, including public
lighting. But as the local economy deindustrialized and jobs evaporated by
the thousands, many residents with the mobility to do so relocated to the
suburbs, a pattern of ‘white flight’ exacerbated by growing racial unrest (and
facilitated by the expanded highway network). According to census data, by
2013 the town had lost about four-fifths of its population since the 1950s,
while Detroit had lost ‘only’ half over the same period (US Census Bureau,
2015). The remaining 10 or 11,000 thousand residents were overwhelmingly
poor, working-class, and African American, with a per-capita income of
around $14,000 and a poverty rate of nearly 50 percent.
Without a strong tax base and municipal budget, basic services were cut.
In addition to the streetlight repossession, Highland Park had no local
police force between 2001 and 2007 (Binelli, 2013: 183); its public library
172   journal of visual culture 16(2)

closed in 2002; and in 2012, the city’s water department was eliminated
and all customers were transferred to the Detroit water grid, resulting in
significantly higher bills for many and, if residents could not afford to pay
them, sudden and inhumane shut-offs (Guillen, 2015). Those who found
themselves unable to pay their electricity bills faced similar disconnections.5
While the repossession helped alleviate the city’s debt to DTE, it placed
even greater financial strain on residents by shifting the burden of street
lighting from the (mostly white) state government and utility company to
local communities of color. Leaving on porch and yard lights to compensate
for the lack of public illumination comes at the cost of higher electric bills
– bills that many residents were already struggling to pay, fueling a cycle
of poverty. The state and utility company effectively outsourced a critical
public infrastructure to private citizens who were already disenfranchised.
And it is this pattern of racial and economic injustice channeled through
the energy grid that Soulardarity is working to undermine by building a
community-controlled lighting infrastructure.

2. Soulardarity
A portmanteau of ‘soul’, ‘solar’, and ‘solidarity’, the non-profit organization
was founded in 2012 to address the lighting crisis by installing solar-
powered lights that are fully owned and operated by the residents of the
neighborhoods they illuminate. Jackson Koeppel, an energetic organizer in
his 20s who made his way to Highland Park from New York City, directs
the group with support from Program Director Nikkia Jones and an advisory
board drawn from the local community.6 In 2015, Soulardarity began moving
toward a member-based organizational structure in which all dues-paying
members have a voice in selecting the board and making key decisions,
such as where new streetlights are installed and how funds are allocated (it
had 67 members as of its first membership meeting in June 2016). Although
most of the organization’s 2016 budget of approximately $65,000 came
from grants, Koeppel and Jones hope that, as more members sign up, the
community will become the core funders of Soulardarity, contributing to
its long-term financial sustainability. Notably, the organization’s structure
mirrors the distributed lighting system they are building: its small staff and
board often work out of individual homes, coming together for meetings
and events or collaborating remotely, without any central office. Instead,
as I suggest below, the solar streetlights themselves function as both
physical and metaphorical gathering points, centers of gravity and common
orientation, which serve to anchor the group’s activities, conversations, and
various initiatives around renewable, community-controlled energy.
The first Soulardarity light was installed on Thanksgiving Day 2012,
illuminating an otherwise dark stretch of Victor Street in an industrial part
of Highland Park near a radio broadcasting station, just one block from
the former Model T plant.7 Costing around $6,500 and paid for with online
donations, it consists of twin photovoltaic panels that use sunlight to charge
four large storage batteries, mounted to the lamppost inside a protective
case. At dusk, an ambient light sensor triggers the energy-efficient LED
 Brennan 
Visionary Infrastructure  173

light to come on, drawing power from the batteries and casting a white
glow across the pavement (see Figure 1). Aside from replacing the batteries
roughly every 10 years, the streetlight requires almost no maintenance,
produces zero emissions, and will continue to run indefinitely without any
recurring energy bills as a fully self-contained and self-sustaining system.
In contrast, regular city-owned streetlights are connected to and therefore
reliant upon the larger energy generation and distribution network of the
grid, a significant portion of which is still powered by the burning of fossil
fuels: Michigan ‘used coal for 50% of its net electricity generation in 2014’,
according to the US Energy Information Administration.8 ‘We are letting
folks know that we can get energy from the sun as opposed to depending
on the energy system that we so heavily rely on’, explains Jones (2016,
personal communication). ‘It is something that is very tangible and very
possible. The power is literally in our hands. We just have to figure out how
to do it, and not let anybody tell us “no”.’
The second installation came nearly two years later, in August 2014. Located
on a quiet block of Avalon Street near Woodward Avenue (see Figure 2),
the light shines over a once-vacant lot that next-door neighbor, community
leader, and Soulardarity advisor Shamayim ‘Shu’ Harris has passionately
transformed into a neighborhood park. The park is dedicated to the memory
of her youngest son, Jakobi Ra, who was tragically struck and killed while
crossing a nearby street when he was two years old. ‘My son’s middle name
is Ra’, Harris (2015, personal communication) emphasizes, ‘and Ra is the
Egyptian god of the sun. And now we have a solar light that’s energized
by the sun’, demonstrating the streetlight’s capacity to symbolically exceed
its infrastructural function. The installation was timed to coincide with a
popular, free music festival, ‘Reggae in the Hood’, which Harris organizes
in the ‘unofficial’ park every summer on her son’s birthday. It was a ‘whole
day of festivities’, she recalls, culminating in the moment when she and
Koeppel ascended above the joyous crowd in a cherry picker to turn the key
on the light, activating it for the first time.
The expansion of Soulardarity’s streetlight program continued with the
installation of four additional lights in December 2015 (see Figure 3).
Manufactured by the Ann Arbor-based company Solartonic, these lights
use a new design in which the solar panels wrap around the lamppost,
increasing energy efficiency throughout the day. The streetlights also have
the ability to host a range of other technologies, including affordable Wi-Fi,
security cameras, and emergency response systems, layering networked
communication infrastructure onto lighting infrastructure, the transmission
of invisible signals onto the provision of visible light. Recognizing the
inevitable limits of scaling the block-by-block model of member-supported
streetlights to the entire city (for example, some blocks do not have enough
residents to collectively finance a light on that block), in 2016 Soulardarity
began coordinating with the Southwest Michigan Regional Energy Office, a
non-profit organization devoted to helping municipalities finance and build
large-scale renewable energy projects, on a plan for a citywide network of
1,000 off-grid solar streetlights. The ‘Let There Be Light’ proposal would
174   journal of visual culture 16(2)

Figure 1  The Soulardarity light at 150 Victor Street. © Photo:

Shane Brennan.

restore Highland Park to pre-repossession levels of illumination, but,

crucially, the lights would be owned by the city rather than the power
company, and would therefore be resistant to repossessions and DTE-
imposed rate increases, as well as blackouts that cascade across the grid.

3. Streetlights as Visionary Infrastructure

This vision for a citywide system of solar lights took shape in response
to the prolonged darkness of the repossession. Contrary to a power
blackout, which momentarily disrupts the cultural normalization that makes
the electrical system largely invisible to many users, the total removal of
 Brennan 
Visionary Infrastructure  175

Figure 2  The light at 24 Avalon Street. © Photo: Shane Brennan.

Figure 3  A Soulardarity sign at the base of one of the lights installed

in December 2015. © Photo: Shane Brennan.
176   journal of visual culture 16(2)

streetlights creates a different kind of infrastructural visibility. Lights were

dismantled one-by-one in broad daylight. They were not coming back on.
There were no repair trucks out fixing power lines, no new streetlamps
being installed in most places. If residents wanted light back on the streets,
they would have to conceive and build a new system. This is the particular
infrastructural visibility of repossession: not an interruption in service that
creates awareness about the infrastructure that provides that service, but the
conspicuous removal of an infrastructure that leaves an open-ended absence
or void to which residents must find ways to adapt in the short term, and in
the long term may fill with their own self-authored infrastructure, reworking
social and political structures in the process.
In this way, the repossession set the conditions for a visionary lighting
infrastructure to emerge. This is not to say that these conditions are ever
desirable. Instead, it is part of what historian and activist Rebecca Solnit
(2009) has called a ‘paradise built in hell’. ‘If paradise now arises in hell’,
she writes, ‘it’s because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure
of most systems, we are free to live and act another way’ (p. 7). Solnit argues
that, by clearing away older, state-run systems, disasters (including the
slow-moving disaster of deindustrialization) can create the space necessary
for local communities to construct new ways of living and acting together.
While she mainly attends to the immediate social responses to disaster, the
concept of visionary infrastructure directs attention to the material systems
that may be built months or even years later by the communities still living
in affected areas.
Visionary infrastructure is a form of material and social practice in which the
collaborative work of building critical infrastructures is inseparable from the
imaginary work of collectively envisioning the future with and through those
infrastructures. This marks a departure from how infrastructures are usually
conceptualized: as mostly fixed assemblages and the material outcomes
of processes of construction, maintenance, and repair (see, for example,
Graham and Swift, 2007). Visionary infrastructure, in contrast, claims that
certain infrastructures can be both completed objects in the world and
beginnings – openings for social action and starting points or catalysts in a
much bigger cultural and political process of reimagining and then slowly
remaking the city from the ground up. They can support not only electricity,
water, or communication, but also ideas, imaginaries, and conversations
about the future. Visionary infrastructure ‘begins with images and stories
of the future to help us imagine and create alternatives to the existing
system’ (Boggs, 2011: xxi). Perhaps counterintuitively, however, these
images and stories are embodied in and told through infrastructure itself.
The initial Soulardarity streetlights, for example, illustrate what a citywide,
community-run, and sustainable lighting system could look like in Highland
Park (as well as other similarly-sized municipalities), and they encapsulate
a compelling story about how a community of residents is coming together
to make it happen. ‘There is a powerful story here about community control
and ownership’, explains Koeppel (2016, personal communication) about
‘organizing not just to keep what we have, but to build new institutions.’
 Brennan 
Visionary Infrastructure  177

Visionary infrastructure projects, then, do two main things. First, they create
an ‘us’, or convene a community of invested participants (this is the organizing,
galvanizing, and mobilizing component of visionary infrastructure). And
second, they facilitate a process by which this community can begin to
‘imagine and create alternatives to the existing system’ (the speculative,
imaginative, future-oriented component). These two aspects of visionary
infrastructure coexist and overlap in reality, but they also have their own
distinct qualities and conditions of emergence.

Visionary infrastructure I: Convening

Visionary infrastructure convenes a community. This is, in fact, language
used by Soulardarity’s director. ‘The role of the streetlights right now is
really as this convening thing’, Koeppel (2015, personal communication)
elaborates, a set of objects that

builds community around this idea of community-owned energy and

starts to convene conversations locally … about doing a community
solar installation that is genuinely supported by, and driven by, the
people in the community the energy is going to serve.

The lights, in other words, work to bring Highland Parkers together and
generate and sustain dialogue among them about how to build additional,
community-owned infrastructure. Much of this convening power of the
lights comes from their pronounced visibility. ‘The importance of doing
those really visible things’, Koeppel continues, ‘is to build community and
start discussions about what a totally alternative system would look like,
and what it would take to get there.’ Streetlights provide an ideal form
for this kind of infrastructural communication since they are designed to
be visible and aid vision. To further accentuate the visibility of the lights,
Soulardarity selected installation points at existing neighborhood gathering
places and promoted the project through regular community meetings and
social media outreach, among other types of engagement.
The Soulardarity lights can be distinguished from what are, in this sense, their
infrastructural opposite: so-called ‘antenna trees’, or cell towers disguised
as natural foliage. As media and visual culture scholar Lisa Parks (2009)
argues in her analysis of the phenomenon, such ‘concealment strategies
keep citizens naïve and uninformed about the network technologies they
subsidize and use each day’. The act of camouflaging undercuts public
awareness about cellular infrastructure and its key role in supporting
everyday communications. The Soulardarity lights do the reverse. Rather
than strategies of concealment, Soulardarity can be seen as deploying tactics
of infrastructure display or exposure. The goal of these tactics is not to keep
residents in the dark (so to speak) about the critical systems that surround
them and upon which they rely, but rather to make these infrastructures
exceptionally visible, thereby encouraging them to learn about and become
178   journal of visual culture 16(2)

involved with their production. In fact, one could argue that the solar
streetlights function not only as a type of lantern, projecting light and
visibility outward, but also as a kind beacon: a luminous point of orientation
around which a community can form and ideas and conversations can
gravitate.9

Visionary infrastructure II: Imagining

Once a community has been convened, a visionary infrastructure then
helps this community imagine and create alternatives to the existing system.
‘System’ is an important word here. Visionary infrastructures tend to be
fairly localized, independent projects (like the first Soulardarity lights), not
full systems in their own right. Yet they are capable of representing the
very real possibility of broader, systemic changes that could occur in the
not-too-distant future. The Soulardarity lights can be seen as emblematic
of a future – one that is achievable and very much desirable – in which the
entire city is illuminated by a full system of solar lights owned and managed
through citizen cooperatives.10 Put simply, a visionary infrastructure project
encourages us to visualize or imagine what the world would look like if
that infrastructure could be reproduced and adopted on a much broader
scale. The solar lights already standing in Highland Park ‘demonstrate what
a different way of doing things could look like’, Koeppel (2015, personal
communication) explains, and ‘create that possibility in people’s minds’.
At first, this ‘different way of doing things’ is limited to a different way
of lighting the city, but the possibilities soon expand to include parallel
interventions into utility infrastructures of all kinds.11
In describing his experience of watching the first solar light go up on
Victor Street, Gerrajh Surles (2015, personal communication), a civic and
environmental engineer who runs the Highland Park Department of Public
Works and advises Soulardarity, encapsulates this ripple effect or chain
reaction in the imaginaries produced by visionary infrastructure:

As I’m looking at the light being installed, I’m envisioning this

happening on every block throughout the city. I’m envisioning the
youth coming together and learning how it was done, and then being
employed doing it themselves – handling the maintenance, changing
the batteries. Then [I’m] seeing solar power grow to things other than
streetlights. That leads to things that I’m passionate about, like waste
and water service. The same model can be followed in many other
different areas.

The sight of one solar streetlight becomes, in his mind, solar lights on ‘every
block’, cared for by a new generation of Highland Parkers, keeping the
infrastructure in the hands of the community. Expanding his vision further,
he imagines other applications for solar power besides lighting (micro-grids
for communal electricity, for instance), as well as how the Soulardarity model
 Brennan 
Visionary Infrastructure  179

of a citizen infrastructure cooperative might be applied to the provision of

other essential services.
But the systems being imagined with and through a visionary infrastructure
project like Soulardarity’s streetlight program are not simply the material
systems of infrastructure: lighting, electricity, and clean water, among others.
They are also the larger political and economic systems in which light,
energy, and other utilities are suspended. ‘We are aware that streetlights are
not the end of the work’, Koeppel (2016, personal communication) is keen
to emphasize:

If we’re really serious about addressing the poverty and racism and
destruction of democracy that is foundational to how our energy
system works, then we need to go way beyond streetlights. We need to
be talking about the rules behind this system [that govern] how people
own and control the power that goes into their homes.

In addition to providing illumination, the Soulardarity streetlights are a way

to begin this larger conversation about how to move toward infrastructural
self-determination at the community level, and thereby upend dominant
racial and economic power structures that have placed many residents in the
precarious position of not being able to access or afford essential utilities.
Soulardarity’s vision for change, in other words, extends beyond correcting
displacements in utility service to include correcting social injustices in how
critical infrastructures are owned and operated, particularly the complex
racial politics of public lighting.12

4. The Critical Visuality of Public Lighting

To better understand how engaging in lighting infrastructure can be
transformative of not only a material system, but also the social and political
systems that surround and infuse it, requires taking a closer look at how
light on the street intersects with race and vision in urban space. As this
section shows, public lighting is deeply imbricated in the politics of race
and racialization, and reimagining and changing how lighting operates also
reworks these immaterial social, cultural, and political dynamics.
By creating a system of streetlights that are controlled by the local
community of color in Highland Park, Soulardarity is intervening in a broad
set of discourses that have mapped darkness or the absence of light onto
blackness (and otherness), and illumination onto whiteness (and privilege).
In her analysis of race in the American literary imagination, Toni Morrison
(1992: 38–39), for example, shows ‘how the image of reined-in, bound,
suppressed, and repressed darkness became objectified in American
literature as an Africanist persona’. Further linking the social visibilities of
race and class to the literal visibilities provided and shaped by infrastructures
of lighting, in Invisible Man (1995[1952]) Ralph Ellison’s unnamed narrator
180   journal of visual culture 16(2)

hoards light and electricity as a way to resist the political order that has
rendered him socially invisible, as well as to fight back against the energy
monopoly; his Harlem basement abode is filled with 1,369 incandescent
bulbs, which illegally draw current from the grid. Resonating with the
situation in Highland Park where the city and many residents are in ‘debt’
to the power company, the novel can be read as a story about lighting
infrastructure as a means of protest, about the intertwining of electrical
power and political power over the lives of others, and about the symbolic
ties between actual illumination and the racial politics of (in)visibility in the
urbanized environment.
Besides shifting these discourses by giving African American residents
control over light and visibility, Soulardarity is also reworking more specific
dynamics around how public illumination is mobilized in state-issued
practices of surveillance and policing. As scholars including Chris Otter
(2008) have argued, light on the street is always already political because
it helps determine how vision is ordered, arranged, and managed in urban
space. This is what I alluded to at the start as infrastructural visuality, and it is
a power over who can see what, where, when, and how that has historically
rested with the state (and only more recently, with utility companies).13 The
Highland Park lighting repossession can be understood as a continuation
of infrastructural visuality, since it involved the state and utility company’s
removal and repositioning of light (concentrating it at intersections, reducing
it almost everywhere else) in order to shape the contours of urban visuality.
Accordingly, one might read Soulardarity’s resistance in the form of an off-
grid lighting network as a form of ‘countervisuality’ (Mirzoeff, 2011), or a
claim to autonomy counter to authority – in this case, the autonomy of local
residents to determine the conditions of the visible and invisible, counter to
the authority of the state and utility company.
This claim to autonomy, moreover, resists a long pattern of light on the
street being used by the state to track, identify, and categorize nonwhite
urban inhabitants as part of the larger ‘infrastructure’ of police surveillance.
Delving into this history underscores the extent to which the racialization
of artificial light has played – and continues to play – a central role in
structuring the relationship between communities of color and police forces
as extensions of state power. And it can be traced back at least as far as the
1600s, when so-called ‘night watches’ were first established in colonial US
cities as the precursors to modern law enforcement. These informal street
patrols, explains historian Peter Baldwin (2012: 11), ‘were assigned to walk
the streets [at night] suppressing disturbances and questioning suspicious
people. They carried lanterns to light their way, rattles to summon help, and
such weapons as staves, clubs, or pikes.’
As cultural theorist Wolfgang Schivelbusch (1988: 97) observes, the watchmen’s
handheld candle lanterns had a ‘dual function as an instrument of surveillance
and a mark of identification’; they simultaneously extended the ability of the
watch to see at night, and, as historian Jane Brox (2015: 15) confirms, ‘made
them visible to others and recognizable as enforcers of order’.
 Brennan 
Visionary Infrastructure  181

Detroit instituted night watches soon after its incorporation as a town in

1802. A city ordinance passed on 31 August 1804, for example, called
for ‘better police … in order to insure additional security for the town …
from Indians, as well as other persons, and from fire, etc.’, with one of the
provisions to form a patrol of five individuals who

shall be employed as a nightly watch … and shall take up, question,

and confine in the watch-house all individuals and riotous persons
found in the streets … and all persons after eleven o’clock who can
give no satisfactory account of themselves. (Farmer, 1884)

On duty between dusk and dawn, the watch carried controlled light/fire and
searched for uncontrolled light/fire. (Besides these light sources, the streets
would have been extremely dark; this was well before the advent of gas
streetlamps in the mid-1800s and the city’s experiments with arc-lamp tower
lighting later in the century.) Already at this early stage, light on the street
was being used to orchestrate visibility and, in this way, to ‘keep order’ on
the streets.
Beginning in the 18th century, ‘lantern laws’ (Browne, 2015: 25) further
centralized control over public light and visibility with the state. ‘Because
travelers without lights would have had an advantage – they could see the
watch but could not be seen – anyone on the streets after dark was also
required to carry a lamp [candle lantern] or torch’, explains Brox (2015: 15).
These laws made visibility compulsory at night for many urban citizens, but
as Baldwin (2012: 11) points out, they did not target all citizens equally:

Women could be arrested for ‘night walking’ if they were suspected of

prostitution. Nonwhites were also vulnerable. In 1703 Boston officials
ordered all blacks and Indians off the streets after 9:00 p.m. because of
their alleged ‘disorders, intolerances, and burglaries.’ … New York in 1713
forbade slaves over fourteen to be in the streets without a lantern during
the hours of the watch, though enforcement appears to be ineffective.

Light on the street thus functioned as a mode of state oppression, as well

as racialization and gender discrimination. The lantern in this context,
argues theorist of race and surveillance Simone Browne (2015: 79), was
‘a technology that made it possible for the black body to be constantly
illuminated from dusk to dawn, made knowable, locatable and contained
within the city’. Structurally, the lantern laws were the inverse of the
night watchmen’s lanterns; they compelled those under surveillance to be
visible at night rather than those doing the surveilling. Yet they produced
a complementary form of state power: as opposed to extending the night-
vision of the police and literally highlighting their position of authority, the
lanterns served as a way to track and thereby regulate the movements of
oppressed individuals, part of a larger apparatus dedicated to what Browne
calls ‘the regulation of black mobilities’ (p. 77).
182   journal of visual culture 16(2)

Modern police forces emerged in tandem with fixed gaslight networks in

19th-century cities, continuing the intricate relationship between lighting
and state control over racialized subjects. ‘As cops and gas lamps spread
nearly simultaneously’, Baldwin (2012: 15) writes, ‘they were understood to
be mutually reinforcing ways to conquer territory from urban barbarians.
Gas lamps could be the best policemen – policemen that might allow the
nocturnal city to be seen, understood, and safely navigated.’ Police and
streetlights had become so closely intertwined that they were often seen as
one and the same (Bouman, 1991: 66). Darkness, by extension, became tied
to lawlessness and criminality, which in turn had been linked to nonwhite
subjects through the racist lantern laws.14
The shift from handheld lanterns to gas streetlights, which were much
brighter and installed at regular intervals on roadside posts, also gave
disciplinary surveillance a new spatial geography. Rather than only
illuminating individual bodies, both those of law enforcement officers and
suspected criminals, public lighting now sought to illuminate the city itself,
extending the visual reach of state power throughout the urban realm.15 The
regulatory function of street lighting, in other words, became less a matter
of tracking the mobile and ‘always, already criminalized’ (Browne, 2015:
79) bodies of black, mixed-race, and indigenous residents, and more about
establishing a fixed infrastructure of visibility that supported constant and
comprehensive surveillance. And to optimize night-time surveillance, both
police and streetlights were positioned at intersections: ‘Policemen could
often be found at street corners’, recounts Baldwin (2012: 25), ‘which served
as strategic vantage points for control of the dark city … Intersections allowed
policemen to survey the streets in multiple directions, and the superior
lighting there allowed them to scrutinize passersby and recognize wanted
criminals.’ This points to one likely reason why corner streetlights were
largely preserved (and sometimes even brightened) during the Highland
Park repossession while most others were eliminated: when coupled with
police surveillance, lights at intersections facilitate centralized control over
urban inhabitants by enhancing the city’s most ‘strategic vantage points’.
Historically, resisting the light (and gaze) of state power involved literally
destroying lanterns in order to create spaces of darkness and invisibility
within which one could move about autonomously. In describing the
uprisings of 19th-century Paris, for example, Schivelbusch (1988: 106)
conveys that ‘lantern smashing’ served as ‘a practical strategy in street
fighting against the forces of the state’. Lanterns were at once an instrument
and symbol of state power, he continues, and their destruction ‘created an
area in which government forces could not operate’ because they could not
see clearly, forming ‘a wall of darkness, so to speak’, that ‘went hand in
hand with … the erection of real walls, or barricades’.
The infrastructural visuality of the Highland Park lighting repossession and
Soulardarity’s countervisuality of solar streetlight installations is essentially
the inverse of this. The repossession channeled state power into the urban
fabric not by adding more light on the street, but by taking lights away,
 Brennan 
Visionary Infrastructure  183

forcing residents to conform to this pattern of reduced lighting by avoiding

darker blocks and keeping to still-lit sections of the city. And Soulardarity
is responding not by creating provisional zones of darkness and invisibility
(what might be called optical barricades), but instead by building their own
streetlights and thereby establishing permanent, autonomous spaces of
light and visibility apart from centralized authority. They are still claiming
freedom and autonomy for the residents of Highland Park, but are doing so
by using infrastructure to make places, bodies, and things visible, rather than
invisible. This ‘performance of freedom’, to borrow a phrase from Browne
(2015: 76–77), is less about escaping disciplinary surveillance, and more
about creating an independent and self-sustaining infrastructure that allows
the community to gain freedom from the power grid and, by extension, the
centralized, corporate, fossil-fuel driven energy economy. It is not so much
a refusal of compulsory state visibility as it is the creation of alternative and
autonomous visibilities through lighting infrastructure.
These autonomous zones of visibility are strategically positioned to
maximize their benefit to local residents. Instead of locating the solar
lights at intersections where they might enhance surveillance and policing,
Soulardarity placed its lights mid-block in areas where residents come
together, network, and socialize – building up the social ‘infrastructure’
of the community. (The light on Avalon Street, for example, is set several
feet back from the curb, and in this way is almost more of a park light
than a streetlight, its purpose to generate visibility within and around this
space of social interaction.) The Soulardarity lights thus work to maintain
and support individual neighborhoods rather than centralized state control
over the urban realm. They do so by enabling residents to claim a kind
of stability or rootedness in light: the streetlights help Highland Parkers
continue to reside on blocks or in neighborhoods from which the removal
of state-run municipal services might otherwise pressure them to abandon.
‘We want to be in a position to never have our streetlights repossessed for
any reason’, Highland Park elder and Soulardarity advisor Margaret Lewis
(2015, personal communication) conveys:

Now, if the city puts streetlights up, we don’t know whether those
streetlights will still be the property of the local energy company.
We don’t know if there [is] some arrangement between the city and
the energy company, and that if the city defaulted on it, [if] we, the
residents, would pay the price of, again, having the lights out. But if
we own the lights, then we are in possession of all information about
the lights.

Lewis is describing a sustainable lighting infrastructure, but it is a kind of

sustainability that extends far beyond how we usually think of sustainability in
terms of renewable energy. Yes, the Soulardarity lights are more sustainable
because they run on sunlight, but they are also sustainable in the sense that
they are owned by the community and thus cannot be repossessed at some
point in the future. This is sustainability as self-reliance and self-sufficiency.
184   journal of visual culture 16(2)

It is the economic sustainability that comes with not having to rely on a

utility provider for power (at least for streetlights), as well as the social and
geographic sustainability created when residents can meet their own basic
needs, and thus maintain their communities.16

Conclusion
Sustainability through light and the production of autonomous zones of
visibility are key aspects of what makes the Soulardarity lights a visionary
infrastructure. They evidence a dramatic rethinking of what a streetlight can
do and whom it should serve, recalling Sean Cubitt’s (2013: 313) observation
that the meanings and experiences of artificial light are never stable; rather,
they are constantly being ‘negotiated, struggled over, dominated here,
resisted there, subverted and remade’. As opposed to simply providing light
to drivers or deterring crime, a streetlight is configured by Soulardarity as
something that can anchor a community and actually change the political
power dynamics of how seeing operates in the city, shifting agency over
these conditions from the state and utility company to residents themselves.
In Highland Park, this struggle over the terms of visuality and the meaning
of light is inseparable from racial politics, and thus it has implications for
how we might continue to engage pressing discussions about the visibility
of black lives and bodies. For instance, it might lead us to think about these
concerns more infrastructurally. Visionary infrastructure, as exemplified by
Soulardarity, is less about the rendering visible of communities of color
within existing frameworks of visuality (state surveillance, policing, etc.)
than it is about disrupting these frameworks by handing control over
the infrastructures that dictate visibility to local communities. This case
is obviously about literal visibility, actual illumination. But it could be
extended to speak to the racial and power dynamics of mediated social
and cultural visibilities, or the ways in which people and communities of
color are represented (and become visible) in media images, narratives, and
discourses. Rather than increasing the visibility across existing, dominant
media platforms and channels, a visionary media infrastructure would
involve the conceptualization and construction of new, local, autonomous,
and sustainable systems of media production that are owned and run at the
neighborhood level – not just the visibility of black lives, but a community
infrastructure to support and maintain that visibility.
The Soulardarity project also points toward a different theory about how
infrastructural change occurs and its political and social ramifications that
expand current scholarly understandings. Rather than assume that remaking
infrastructure only occurs gradually through processes of maintenance,
decay, and repair, or through rebuilding efforts after sudden, accidental
failure, Soulardarity leads us to think about infrastructural change as a
moment of revolutionary potential. The necessary work of getting the lights
back on or the water running can be a deliberate act made in response to
a state and model of corporate utility governance that has failed to provide
 Brennan 
Visionary Infrastructure  185

adequate service, an act that carries not just the possibility for the restoration
of service, but also the potential to change the very power structures of the
energy system in ways that work against the forces of institutional racism,
neoliberal privatization, cycles of poverty, and increasing environmental
degradation. It is this potentiality that visionary infrastructure encapsulates
and works toward.
Other visionary infrastructure projects may intervene in systems that are
less overtly visual than lighting and media representation, but they would
still involve – and be defined by – a similarly radical and democratic
reconceptualization of the purpose, potentialities, and power differentials
of infrastructure. Future research may begin to map out an entire network
of visionary infrastructures that extends well beyond Detroit and the
Midwest, from urban farms practicing visionary agriculture to communal
wells and rainwater-capture systems that operate as visionary waterworks
for their communities. Even so, Detroit and Highland Park will remain a
critical node in this broader network; just as they were once the epicenter
of American automotive manufacturing, these cities are now an epicenter
for communal and sustainable infrastructures. This is because such
projects tend to be built out of necessity as solutions to the collapse –
or outright removal and repossession – of prior municipal systems run by
the state, something that has unfortunately occurred more here than in
many other places. Notable examples include not only Soulardarity, but
also the hundreds of community gardens that have transformed vacant lots
into sites of food production, the James and Grace Lee Boggs School that
is pioneering elementary education with an emphasis on engagement in
local communities and their histories, and the Heidelberg Project, a multi-
block public art installation and neighborhood revitalization effort. Like
Soulardarity, these collaborative initiatives create new support systems for
the city (local agriculture, education, and cultural programming) while also
working toward community empowerment and sustainability writ large.
In this way, Soulardarity is part of a much larger shift happening in
Detroit toward grassroots infrastructures built by and for citizens, ways of
organizing the material and economic conditions of urban life that are not
centered around the profits of large corporations or the maintenance of
state power. These systems arise when the old systems fail, but they are
wholly the product of the hard work, dedication, and visionary thinking
of local communities. While Detroit and Highland Park are on the front
lines of this shift, it is a transformation that may soon impact many
other parts of the US and world as economies continue to dematerialize,
infrastructures crumble, social inequalities intensify, and climate change
necessitates new, more sustainable ways of living. ‘Detroit will never be
rebuilt as it was’, Solnit (2014: 76) predicts: ‘It will be the first of many
cities forced to become altogether something else.’ Visionary infrastructure
describes the process of imagining and starting to build this ‘something
else’. As such, it serves as a way to link together and build solidarity around
a range of projects happening in different places and sectors of society. It
186   journal of visual culture 16(2)

underscores the role of imagination and critical visuality in the production

and deployment of alternative infrastructures as a form of activism. And it
articulates how projects like Soulardarity not only set out to solve an urgent
problem, but also capture a sense of urgency around the need to remake
larger systems in a more just and sustainable direction. When we look at a
solar lighting cooperative or a community farm, we see on the surface the
much-needed provision of light and safety, food and social relationships.
Visionary infrastructure proposes that we also learn to see such projects as
revolutionary models and visions of the future in their own right, and thus
learn to see through them to something bigger.

Acknowledgement
This research was partially supported by a Leboff Dissertation Research Grant
from the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, NYU. I wish to thank
Nicholas Mirzoeff and Nicole Starosielski for their insightful comments during the
course of this research, though any errors are entirely my own.

Notes
  1. Those who struggle to gain access to basic infrastructures, or who are
involved in their construction, operation, maintenance, or repair, are often
more attuned to their presence. And in many other parts of the developing
world, basic infrastructures remain a visible topic of conversation precisely
because they do not operate consistently, or because they are assembled or
modified through informal processes (see Larkin, 2008).
  2. As Chris Otter (2008: 1) writes, ‘Who could see what, whom, when, where, and
how was, and remains, an integral dimension of the everyday operation and
experience of power’ (original emphasis).
  3. Founded in 1903 as the Detroit Edison Company, DTE Energy is the parent
company of both DTE Electric and DTE Gas. In 2011, the year of the lighting
repossession, DTE Energy reported second-quarter earnings of $202 million,
and third-quarter earnings of $183 million.
  4. Nandi (she goes by only her first name) has also served on the advisory board
of Soulardarity.
  5. Unlike the water network, Highland Park was already on the DTE grid before
the city fell under emergency financial management in the early 2000s. When
Highland Park’s streetlights were repossessed, Detroit was suffering through
its own lighting crisis: over half of the city’s 88,000 streetlights were burned
out or broken. But although the cities share a blurry border, the governmental
responses could not have been more different. By 2014, tens of thousands of
new LED streetlights were being installed across Detroit under the direction of
the newly created Public Lighting Authority, a separate legal entity from the
city of Detroit funded by the sale of approximately $185 million in state bonds
(see http://www.pladetroit.org, accessed 28 March 2016). Highland Park,
meanwhile, received no such assistance.
  6. The organization’s other two founding members were AJ O’Neil, and Kyle
Wohlfort. Both have since left the group for other pursuits.
  7. Ford sold the complex to a group of investors in 1981, but continued to lease
one section as a storage facility for corporate documents and equipment.
The Woodward Avenue Action Association (a local historical preservation
 Brennan 
Visionary Infrastructure  187

organization) has plans to one day open a museum and visitor center on
the premises (see http://www.woodwardavenue.org/invest/preserve-ford-
highland-park, accessed 6 April 2016). For more on the history of the plant
and the assembly line, see Nye (2013) and Hooker (1997).
  8. The next largest energy source was nuclear (30%) (see US Energy Information
Administration, 2015).
  9. As community and dialogue take shape around the lights, Soulardarity also
leverages the visibility of the streetlights in order to pivot the conversation
toward other, less visible areas of the energy economy. In 2014, for
example, they hosted a ‘passive solar heating party’ in which participants
were instructed on how to build their own solar-powered window heater
out of nothing more than cardboard, aluminum foil, tape, and black spray-
paint, materials costing less than two dollars. This practical knowledge was
combined at the event with information about where Michigan’s electricity
comes from (mostly coal-fired plants) as well as a tutorial in how to decode
the costs on one’s energy bill.
10. The notion that streetlights consolidate or communicate something about
the identity of the larger city is one that dates back at least to the early 20th
century in the US. As curator and historian Christopher Bedford (2008: 766)
observes, the marketing materials produced by streetlamp manufacturers in
the 1920s often used ‘the quality of illumination provided by a given lamp …
as a metaphor for the character of the city that was to host those lamps.’
11. This idea that solar infrastructure can spur broader visions of the city and
its future resonates with what Adam Flynn (2014) has termed ‘solarpunk’,
an aesthetic (and potential movement) united by the desire to collectively
imagine a greener, more sustainable near-future for humanity. Solarpunk ‘is
about ingenuity, generativity, independence, and community’, he writes. While
some of the core ideas of solarpunk overlap with visionary infrastructure, they
take very different forms. Solarpunk, at least in its current iteration, mainly
consists of solar-inspired images and texts shared through online platforms,
but visionary infrastructures actually exist in the world as systems already
serving the needs of their communities.
12. It is this commitment to social and political change that distinguishes visionary
infrastructures from a seemingly related concept, ‘inverse infrastructures,’ which
Egyedi et al. (2012) define as infrastructures that arise spontaneously within
knowledge and information networks such as the internet. While they do share
certain characteristics, including a democratic and distributed organizational
structure, visionary infrastructures are not spontaneous occurrences, but rather
deliberate responses to social and environmental injustices that warrant the
reconceptualization and reconstruction of basic municipal systems.
13. While my analysis focuses on how streetlights help shape and determine what
is visible or not in the space of the city, I also fully recognize that visuality is
much broader than just vision, visibility, and how seeing operates. As Nicholas
Mirzoeff (2011: 3–4) suggests, visuality is an arrangement of the political field
in which bodies, places, and things in the world are classified and separated.
It then involves the cultural work by which these classificatory regimes are
‘aestheticized’ in order to appear ‘natural’ or ‘correct’.
14. City ‘lights not only aided police; they were police’, asserts Mark Bouman
(1991: 66, emphases in the original), ‘lamps and police, with their dual
purposes of rooting out darkness and crime, were interchangeable.’ ‘In many
English cities’, he continues, ‘the lamps were literally called “police lamps,” and
the “Police Commissioners” had jurisdiction over the placement of the lamps.’
188   journal of visual culture 16(2)

15. This change in the strategy of lighting coincided with a shift in law
enforcement strategy from looking out for crimes already in progress to crime
prevention.
16. Oakland-based artist Marc Bamuthi Joseph (2014) has called for an
environmental movement that does a better job of connecting sustainability
to issues of race and class, and which recognizes ‘that sustainable survival
practices in poor communities are just as significant as solar panels and
LED lights’. Soulardarity successfully bridges these two meanings and
manifestations of sustainability: community survival practices and ‘green’
technologies. It positions solar power as not only a technological solution
to climate change mitigation (and way to help ensure planetary survival),
but also a tactic for community sustainability defined as the preservation of
everyday life at the local level.

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Shane Brennan is a PhD candidate in the Department of Media, Culture, and

Communication at NYU, where he focuses on visual culture, environmental media,
and infrastructure studies. Recent publications include an essay on the culture of
cloud backup in Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment,
edited by Nicole Starosielski and Janet Walker (Routledge, 2016).

Address: New York University Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human
Development, 239 Greene Street, 8th floor, New York, NY 10003, USA. [email: shane.
brennan@nyu.edu]