DescriptiWhat makes an American road novel? What are the material conditions that caused it to emerge in the mid-twentieth century? Why does it persist, what does it tell us about infrastructure, and why has it travelled so widely – but also unevenly – through literary cultures across the globe? In this episode, Dom sat down with Myka Tucker-Abramson to discuss her recent book, Cartographies of Empire: The Road Novel and American Hegemony (Stanford 2025). Drawing on an archive of more than 140 road novels, Myka asks what this seemingly straightforward genre can tell us about the hopes, contradictions, and disappointments of infrastructure as it has been scripted in the US and across its informal empire on goes here

How does rain impact how and when people get around, whether on foot, on public transport, or in private vehicles? How does it affect how we use outdoor and public spaces, from parks to streets and shopping centres? How does rain reveal faults or failures in our infrastructure? And how might we redesign our cities in ways that allow us to embrace and live with rain? Dom sat down with Andrew Hoolachan, a Lecturer in Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Glasgow, and Bobby Jewell, an architectural communications consultant, sound artist, and writer based in Glasgow. We discussed Andrew’s Living With Rain report and Bobby’s exhibition and album You Are Not Made Of Sugar.

How can city makers renew urban spaces in ways that benefit existing residents, rather than displacing them? And how have communities organised to resist their displacement? On 28 November, TTiN put these questions and more to a panel of academics and practitioners: Charmaine Brown, community activist in Peckham and Lecturer at the University of Greenwich; Anna Minton, journalist, author, and Reader at the University of East London; Betty Owoo, Senior Design Officer in the Greater London Authority's Design Unit; and Ash Rao, urban designer and planner on the GLA’s Regeneration and Planning team.

What would you say if you had 5 minutes to talk to Matt Damon about the “global water crisis”? On 18 October, TTiN hosted Filippo Menga for a conversation about this and other questions addressed in his book, Thirst: The Quest to Solve the Global Water Crisis (Verso 2025). With responses from Naho Mirumachi, Professor in Environmental Politics at King's College London, and Julie Froud, Professor of Financial Innovation at the University of Manchester, this session explored Filippo’s groundbreaking account of the global water crisis and the failure of corporations and non-profits to address its worsening effects.

Professor Juliet Fall is a political and environmental geographer at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. Juliet’s work focuses on questions of border infrastructure, biosecurity, and the boundaries between humans and nature. In this podcast, we discussed her new book, Along the Line: Writing with Comics and Graphic Narrative in Geography, which interleaves ethnographic comics with academic essays. Our conversation explored what it means to research infrastructure through drawing, the layered histories of borders in Europe, and the way both infrastructure and drawing mediate between scales of the abstract and the intimate.

How can art and storytelling help us to make sense of infrastructures as concrete and symbolic systems? How do we map the social, cultural, and imaginative aspects of infrastructure? Giada Peterle is a visual artist, comics author, and urban walker, and author of Comics as a Research Practice (2021). Her work explores how arts-based and narrative approaches can expand the ways we think through and with infrastructures. She experiments with creative mapping practices that include comic book cartographies and geoGraphic narratives. In this talk, Giada presents a series of urban experiments that use comics, autoethnography, walking, and photography as methods for telling infrastructural stories.

Dr Nicola Kirkby is Centre Manager for DIVERSE CDT, the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Diversity in Data Visualization, at City St George’s, University of London, and a member of the steering group for the Thinking Through Infrastructure Network. In this podcast she discusses her new book, Railway Infrastructure and the Victorian Novel: From Platform to Plot via the Railroad, which is out now with Cambridge University Press. The conversation explores the different ways that rail infrastructure has reshaped the novel as the nineteenth century progressed, and asks how close reading can help us to see and think differently about the social and cultural impact of infrastructure. There’s also some healthy Raymond Williams stanning.

Professor Alex Tickell is a historian and critic of global literatures in English. This panel event launched his book, City Fictions of the New India, published in 2025 by Oxford University Press. In the book and this recorded discussion, Alex discusses how fiction, literary journalism, the graphic novel, and television drama have reimagined the relationship between infrastructure and citizenship in contemporary Indian cities. Alex is in conversation with Professor Ruvani Ranasinha (King's College London) and Professor David Johnson (Open University).

Infrastructure is comprised of systems or networks so complex that we can never see them in their physical totality. Yet they also shape the most immediate conditions of our lived experience, unevenly redistributing wealth, time, and life itself across society. What kind of stories do we need to apprehend infrastructure? How can we see it and bring it under our collective control? How do we contest its arrangement of deep inequalities and begin to organise around alternatives? Chaired by Dom Davies, this discussion is led by Zack Polanski, Deputy Leader of the Green Party and Member of the London Assembly, and Joel De Mowbray, founder of Yes Make, an infrastructure delivery organisation that specialises in empowering communities through the construction of public spaces, with members of the Thinking Through Infrastructure Network.

It's hard to escape the feeling that in Britain today nothing works. Economic growth and higher wages are simply not enough. This is because the so-called "cost of living crisis" is only the face of a deeper crisis of foundational liveability. How can we address failing public services and decaying social infrastructure? What is the foundational economy and how do we rebuild it? What is the role of cultural infrastructure in this process? On this lunchtime panel, Julie Froude (Manchester) and Sukhdev Johal (QMUL), members of the Foundational Economy Collective and two co-authors of When Nothing Works (2023), discuss these questions alongside Justin O'Connor (South Australia), author of Culture of is Not Industry (2024).