In this talk, I explore the accelerating crisis of the university by looking at the fallout of the so-called "method wars" and the simultaneous institutionalization of the environmental humanities.  I think about how method has become a smokescreen and stand-in for politics and provides the university with both an alibi and scapegoat for its continued role in accelerating anthropogenic climate change and supporting genocide. I then track the role of the so-called "infrastructural humanities" that has emerged as a way to think differently about what we do as critics and, crucially, the role of the university in enabling critique. Drawing from a strand of current Black Studies scholarship, I argue that infrastructure, as both method and object, might enable new relations to our crumbling institutions and the communities in which they are embedded.

Henry Ivry is a Lecturer in 20th and 21st Century Literature in the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow. His first book, Transscalar Critique: Climate, Blackness, Crisis, was published by Edinburgh UP in 2023 and he is currently working on a new monograph, Incommensurate Repair: Infrastructure, Insurgency, and the African American Imaginary under contract with Stanford UP. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in English Literary History, Modern Fiction Studies, Contemporary Literature, Studies in the Novel, and other venues. He is also a failed DJ.