CFP: Debates in the Digital Humanities: Critical Infrastructure Studies & Digital Humanities

The Debates in Digital Humanities Series invites 500-word abstracts for its latest edition, Critical Infrastructure Studies & Digital Humanities. Edited by Alan Liu, Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, and James Smithies, this volume address critical infrastructure studies, an emergent “framework for linking thought on the complex relations between society and its material structures across fields such as science and technology studies, design, ethnography, media infrastructure studies, feminist theory, critical race and ethnicity studies, postcolonial studies, environmental studies, animal studies, literary studies, the creative arts, and others.” As the call for proposal explains, this volume:

This growing body of work explores why infrastructure is essential for understanding people’s lives, practices, and identities; how humans and other creatures are embedded in infrastructural systems even as they make or resist such systems; and how the world might be transformed through infrastructural interventions. As an amalgam of things and ideas, infrastructure comes saturated with relations between materials, artifacts, systems, individuals, groups, institutions (including academic ones), governmental bodies, and cultures that at once actively shape experience and seem passively just to be that felt and known experience. Studying critically these relations of heterogeneous entities and agencies requires bringing the perspectives of different disciplines of infrastructure into collision to question what infrastructure is, who it is for, and how to envision better infrastructures—ones more just, caring, and sustainable at both local and global levels. Examined critically, infrastructure surfaces from the status of substrate to reveal a continual clash between forms of power and contestation, freedom and constraint, globalism and localism, design and mess, functionality and sustainability, standardization and difference, and closed and open technologies in the materials of culture… Critical Infrastructure Studies & Digital Humanities will bring infrastructural approaches front and center as an area where DH is uniquely equipped to lead the humanities in thought and practice, using its own infrastructural legacy as inspiration and mirror. The aim is to understand how infrastructure underpins and influences DH, and how DH in turn can influence infrastructure design, development, and maintenance. The volume will promote understanding of critical infrastructure studies as a field of writing and practice, and open dialogues between DH and cognate infrastructural fields.

Proposals should generally fit into three broad categories: Critical Infrastructure Studies from the Perspective of DH (~6000 word argumentative essays), Digital Humanities from the Perspective of Critical Infrastructure Studies (~6000 word argumentative essays), and (Re)Envisioning DH Infrastructure. This third category might include:

• Critical Anatomies or Archeograms probing existing DH infrastructures (or other infrastructures that would interest digital humanists) in the analytic mode of X-ray visions, exploded diagrams, system and network diagrams, maps, architectures, models, specifications or protocols, or site investigations. (For the idea of an “archaeogram,” see Armelle Skatulski, “Data Archeogram: Mapping the Datafication of Work,” Autonomy, n. d.)
• Infrastructural Reimaginings proposing hypothetical, fictional, artistic, critical, “deformance(d),” “glitched,” or other alternatives to existing or dominant DH infrastructures (or other infrastructures of interest to digital humanists and humanists). For example, an infrastructural reimagining could envisage an alternative social media platform; a different paradigm for a classroom; or a non-Western or -Northern design for “networked,” “mobile,” “open source,” “commons,” “private,” “secure,” or “artificial intelligence” digital information systems. How is, or should, infrastructure be imagined from the point of view of the Global South, Africa, the East, island cultures, and indigenous cultures?

Deadlines

• Abstracts (500 words) and a short bio due: December 15, 2021 (Include in the abstract a projected length for the final contribution.)
• Decisions on acceptance of abstracts by February 28, 2022
• Full submissions (essays or other kinds of contributions) by September 1, 2022
• Peer-to-peer reviewing and editors’ reviewing September–November, 2022
• Revised submissions by January 31, 2023
• Final editors’ review February–March, 2023 (final revisions by authors expected by summer 2023)
• Submission of volume to U. Minnesota Press: Summer or Fall 2023

Submissions

Please submit 500-word abstracts and a short bio to ayliu@english.ucsb.edu, urszula.pawlicka-deger@kcl.ac.uk, and james.smithies@kcl.ac.uk. (Please address all three editors.)