Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0009-0007-2975-7911

Date Available

5-21-2026

Year of Publication

2024

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Document Type

Master's Thesis

College

Arts and Sciences

Department/School/Program

Geography

First 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

Available for download on Thursday, May 21, 2026

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