King’s Digital Lab, King’s College Department of Digital Humanities, and Critical Infrastructures Studies Initiative (cistudies.org) invite you to a workshop on “Interrogating Global Traces of Infrastructure” to be held virtually on November 18, 2021. The second workshop in the series, this workshop seeks
to discuss the global dimensions of infrastructure – scale, flow, accessibility, durability, and transparency – and their impact on localized socio-technical practices. This complex topic touches on many aspects of Critical Infrastructure Studies as a practice, including platformization, global supply chains, public infrastructures, distributed labor, automatization, cloud computing, environment, and the politics of archives. These pressing issues are nontrivial methodologically. Some of the difficulties of studying infrastructure from a global perspective are suggested by the following questions: How can we reveal the global traces of infrastructures in our daily work? How can local case studies be scaled up? What does it mean to study infrastructures at a distance? What is the best practice to obtain and process large quantities of data? How can we identify the “infrastructural endpoints” – the geographical, social, and economic points of disintegration of the global socio-technical system? And, perhaps most important: How can we contest something that happens at a global scale? What can scholars as individuals do to interrogate and envision better global infrastructures?
The workshop includes:
- Introduction by Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, King’s College London, UK (Lead Organizer)
- Panel discussion: Geoffrey C. Bowker (University of California, Irvine, US), Paul N. Edwards (Stanford University, US), Jennifer Gabrys (University of Cambridge, UK), Noortje Marres (University of Warwick, UK) — (chair: Jonathan Gray)
- 2 sessions featuring a range of scholars, including Miriam Posner, University of California, Los Angeles, US), Anne Helmond, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands), Ned Rossiter, Western Sydney University, Australia), Shatha Mubaideen, Council for British Research in the Levant, UK) and Ian Milligan, University of Waterloo, Canada)
Registration for this free workshop is required.