Infrastructures are both relational and ecological, visible and invisible. They’ve been described as most apparent upon breaking, as ubiquitous as the “ambient conditions of life,” and as “matter that moves other matter,” forming the anatomical structures for everyday life (Star 1999; Anand, Gupta, Appel 2018; Larkin 2013).
Digital infrastructures take on all of these incongruous qualities as they interact with the built, natural, and social environments. Physical elements of digital infrastructures often distribute harms to vulnerable communities while centralizing the benefits to companies and communities in the Global North (Chachra 2021; Livingstone 2024; Masood and Bhattacharya 2024). These infrastructures have become a key tension point around the globe, seeding land disputes, climate effects, and disrupting social fabrics. They can create networks of extraction and harm along global supply chains: from broadband infrastructure, to data centers, to undersea cables, and semiconductor production facilities, digital infrastructures shift the geopolitical, racial, and socioeconomic ecosystems in the places they take root. At the same time, robust social infrastructures have grown to resist, refute, play upon, and take on these digital and physical infrastructures — creating even more complex webs of engagement.
While these infrastructures impose physical, material, and social consequences, they are also intertwined with myths of progress, transformation, and speculation. Companies and communities alike craft stories about how digital infrastructures enter, transform, and abandon cities, towns, and villages around the world. Policymakers lean on infrastructure investments as harbingers of economic transformation, positioning companies as job creators that signal positive change.
Calling upon this complexity, this workshop seeks to share, craft, spin, and uncover stories of community engagement, resistance, clash, and surprising encounters with digital infrastructures. What myths, theories, and speculations are communities crafting about new digital infrastructures, and who is telling these stories? What stories do these social and digital concepts tell and conceal? How are digital infrastructures showing up in unexpected ways in everyday life? What do these infrastructures take from communities, and how do people resist and respond? What kinds of resistance to technological infrastructures tip the scale, breaking or engendering trust?
What We’re Looking For
This workshop will convene scholars, practitioners, artists, and activists to reflect, critique, and imagine the manifold ways that digital, physical, and social infrastructures are built, broken, reconstructed, and mythologized. We seek to gather written, visual, and sonic stories that encourage participants to think of themselves “more as activists affecting change in the field than as documentarians of the problems” (Edwards, Cooper, Hogan 2024). We are particularly interested in work — whether ongoing, in progress, or completed — that does one or more of the following:
- Centers the lived experience of people and places vis-a-vis digital, physical, and social infrastructure.
- Provides theoretical, ethnographic, or creative perspectives that allow for alternative storytelling.
- Addresses infrastructural shifts, intrusions, expansions, destruction, or construction in collaborative, creative, community-based ways.
- Centers the stories that infrastructures tell and conceal.
- Emphasizes stories from the majority world, rooted in Indigeneity, and/or emerging from communities that hold multiple marginalities.
Focus
We invite participants to craft a short sonic, visual, or written narrative that engages with questions of infrastructural entanglement with community. A review committee will select participants from an open call. Once accepted, we will ask that participants develop their submission into a longform narrative to share and workshop with fellow participants.
On the first day of the workshop, participants will present their submission material in small groups and receive constructive feedback. After a week, we will reconvene for a second workshop day, in which participants will present their edited material to the larger group, building toward a larger vision of our shared connective t(issue). The workshop will culminate in a collection of curated written, sonic, and visual works examining digital infrastructures from a variety of perspectives, mediums, and viewpoints.
