[Air-L] New Book: Letters, Power Lines, and Other Dangerous Things: The Politics of Infrastructure Secuirty

[Ellis, Ryan]

Hello AOIR folks,

It is an odd time to be doing book promo, but I am nonetheless happy to announce that my new book, Letters, Power Lines, and Other Dangerous Things: The Politics of Infrastructure Security, is now available both for purchase and open access via MIT Press! Summary and links are below.

Summary/Jacket Text: After September 11, 2001, infrastructures—the mundane systems that undergird much of modern life—were suddenly considered “soft targets” that required immediate security enhancements. Infrastructure protection became the core of the new Department of Homeland Security’s mission. In this book, Ryan Ellis examines how post-9/11 security concerns have remade and reordered infrastructure. It was, he argues, a stunning transformation. Decades of market-based deregulation had created systems that were both vulnerable to systemic failure and politically unaccountable. Ellis describes the way workers, civic groups, city councils, bureaucrats and others were able to use the threat of terrorism as a political resource, taking the opportunity not only to address security vulnerabilities but also to reassert a degree of public control over infrastructure.

Ellis maps these changes to infrastructural governance and politics through an examination of three U.S. infrastructure: the postal system, the freight rail network, and the electric power grid. He describes, among other things, how debates about protecting the mail from anthrax and other biological hazards spiraled into larger arguments over worker rights, the power of large-volume mailers, and the fortunes of old media in a new media world; how environmental activists, building on post-9/11 controls over rail shipments of toxic materials, formed a powerful coalition to take on the rail industry and the chemical lobby; and how otherwise marginal federal regulators parlayed new mandatory cybersecurity standards for the electric power industry into a robust system of accountability.

It is now available for purchase via:
Amazon: bit.ly/dangerous-things<https://t.co/sxfDjE5dRC?amp=1>
Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/books/letters-power-lines-and-other-dangerous-things-the-politics-of-infrastructure-security/
MIT Press: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/letters-power-lines-and-other-dangerous-things

Please note: MIT Press has also generously made it available via Open Access (at the MIT Press link above).

Take care,
Ryan
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Ryan Ellis
Assistant Professor
Department of Communication Studies
Northeastern University
r.ellis at neu.edu<mailto:r.ellis at neu.edu>