A field guide to infrastructural analysis

Infra-legalites and Critical Data Studies present: A field guide to infrastructural analysis An early career workshop with Julie Cohen, Gavin Sullivan and Morgan Currie

About the event

In everyday talk, the notion of infrastructure conjures physical installations: roads, bridges, pipes and cables. Across the humanities and social sciences disciplines, however, the concept has developed into an analytic that moves beyond the brute fixity of physical infrastructure, to examine socio-material formations that afford, constrain, assert power and forge new political uses in ways that diverge from their initial design and implementation goals.

Fiercely empirical, an infrastructural analytic is increasingly applied to a range of research phenomena, from content moderation and automated payment systems, to larger, more nebulous configurations such as global security arrangements and the digital public sphere. To do this, it ‘probes downward and outward’ (Cohen 2023: 17) via critical entry points: sites of habituation, contestation, breakdown and change. Scholars have encouraged us to ask not what, but ‘when is an infrastructure’ (Star & Ruhleder 1996: 112), positioning infrastructures as ‘critical locations through which sociality, governance, and politics, accumulation and dispossession, and institutions and aspirations are formed, reformed, and performed’ (Appel, Anand, and Gupta 2018: 3).

Given this fluidity and translucency, as analysts, how might we identify sites for study and where exactly might we probe? This one-day workshop invites early-career researchers to map the key analytical concepts and methods of infrastructural analysis with leading scholars engaged with this analytic in their respective fields. Here, our aims are twofold: first, to develop a shared account of what it means to think infrastructurally across disciplines, and then second, to equip early-career researchers with a springboard for future work.

The workshop is designed as an in-person event and will accommodate a maximum of 20 participants (including the organisers). As space is limited, participants will be selected based on their responses to the short registration form below.

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