critical infrastructure lab

Open panel at the annual meeting of the Society for the Social Studies of Science, the professional society of Science and Technology scholars.

The concept of sociotechnical imaginaries is very popular in STS research, yet we suggest that has reached the limits of its explanatory powers. Sociotechnical imaginaries insufficiently account for power imbalances in the design, standardisation, production, and maintenance of infrastructures and their governing institutions. To overcome this problem, we invite contributions that foreground power and technological materiality, and do not solely, or mainly, take identities, opinions, and visions as a starting point for arguments. Technological materialities are not merely a reflection of aligned interests, expertises, or identities. Material affordances of technology can subvert the influence of actors. Such a process is not necessarily intentional, but can emerge in the use and maintenance of a technology. The concept of ideology can explain who exerts power, how such power is exerted and subverted, and what is at stake in social conflicts around material configurations. We build on Althusser and Humphrey in saying that ideology is not simply a linguistic phenomenon; it also appears in material structures, discourses, institutions, and practices. We want to further explore what this notion can do to explain how social conflicts are articulated through struggles over shaping materiality, often under the guise of a (co-)production process. We call for contributions from researchers who are interested in exploring conceptual frameworks that can better account for the role of materiality and power in the social conflicts around technological innovation, standardisation, deployment, and maintenance, including but not limited to renewed interest in ideology as a conceptual framework.

Open panel at the annual meeting of the Society for the Social Studies of Science, the professional society of Science and Technology Studies scholars.

Political and industrial narratives present technology as the solution to the multiple ecological crises society is confronted with, without engaging with the material consequences in terms of minerals, land, labour, and energy (Crawford, 2021; Cubitt, 2016; Hogan et al., 2022). As Dr. Max Liboiron traces out in ‘Pollution is Colonialism’ (2021), extraction and pollution are legitimated through threshold theories of harm, which set arbitrary limits on harmful practices and allow ‘acceptable’ amounts of pollution to continue. Liboiron demonstrates how this approach to managing harms obscures the institutions and actors that perpetrate violence in the first place, foreclosing possibilities to resist and transform power relations. With this open panel, we invite contributions that engage with Liboiron’s call to move from ‘a question of harm that asks ‘how much’ … to ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions about violence’ (Liboiron 2021). We bring this question to the context of digital technologies and their social and environmental implications, asking what such a switch of perspective might look like with regard to ‘Big Tech’ monopolies, the distributedness and scales of networked computing infrastructures, and their entanglements with extractive industries (c.f. Arboleda 2020). How can systemic violence and questions of accountability be addressed in this context? Contributions can range from papers unpacking how a narrow economic lens on climate change (‘green capitalism’) perpetuates violence; to explorations of research methodologies putting feminist, anticolonial, critical race, and solidarity epistemologies into practice; to projects that develop alternative sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim 2015) for the principles that organise internet infrastructures.

Open panel at the annual meeting of the Society for the Social Studies of Science, the professional society of Science and Technology Studies scholars.

The Russian aggression against Ukraine and the violation of its people and territories have a long history. Situated between a number of colonial powers, Ukraine and its people were imaged and imagined as a component of material exchange, while the anti-imperial resistance is systematically ignored. In this panel, we question the material consequences of the war in Ukraine, the imperial forces at work, and the resistance against them. We want to explore different angles of the conflict through theoretical concepts and the analysis of the material conditions. For instance, the production of terror environments (Matviyenko), resourcification (Bazdyrieva, Richardson), erasure as a tool of imperialism (Tsymbalyuk), etc. We invite contributions that explore and expose the socio-material aspects of the war across topographies and topologies, such as sea (through gas pipelines, submarine cables, and bridges), sky (through satellites and drones), and land (electrical grids and trenches). The long-term slow and fast violence against the people and environment of Ukraine shapes an ecology that is not just endangering people or/and the ecology itself, but the ability to recognize subjectivity and agency at the “peripheries” of imperial powers. This panel aims to bring to the fore different kinds of spatial, environmental, and ideological reconfigurations that have led to the current moment. We aim to center Ukrainian scholars and their experiences, while also inviting other scholars to contribute.

How does capitalism integrate hackers? Can hacking flourish outside capitalism? Why anti-capitalist movements need hackers? What connects hackers’ movements, scenes and projects to past and future struggles against capital?

Launch of monograph Resistance to the current: the dialectics of hacking in MIT Press’ Information Policy series in a session at the Chaos Communication Camp.

Session at the Chaos Communication Camp