Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0009-0007-2975-7911
Date Available
5-21-2026
Year of Publication
2024
Document Type
Master's Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
College
Arts and Sciences
Department/School/Program
Geography
Advisor
Dr. Nick Lally
Abstract
The Critical Path AIDS Project was a grassroots information network that distributed AIDS-related information related to biomedicine, social services, and politics. I explore the ways the project made sense of the shattering social service and care landscapes they emerged within and responded to. I situate Critical Path’s work within Philadelphia’s splintering care infrastructures and the experience of crisis Lauren Berlant argues structures perception of neoliberal life. I focus on the ways that Critical Path’s articulation of crisis and spatial re-orientation pull on the modernist design work of Buckminster Fuller. Fuller’s design work formed a framework through which the project constructed contours of care and survival. I consider the military and countercultural references undergirding Fuller’s work and argue that they index an attempt to bring Philadelphia’s early crisis scene into legibility by overlaying memories of a military-Keynesianism onto Philadelphia’s early epidemic. Through this, the project constructs provisional infrastructures, drawing new connections across existing care nodes in an attempt to produce new infrastructural routes which would allow readers a better chance at staying alive and remaining affectively attached to life. These routes ultimately served as an attempt to draw together a style of centralized project planning absent in Philadelphia’s neoliberalizing landscape.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.13023/etd.2024.358
Recommended Citation
Feinberg, Sid, "Crisis, Genre, and the Informatic Infrastructure of the Critical Path AIDS Project in Philadelphia's Early Epidemic" (2024). Theses and Dissertations--Geography. 101.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/geography_etds/101
