CDII Events

Join us for coffee and conversation to start the day, before our keynote presentation from Maxigas of the Critical Infrastructure Lab.

Keynote Presentation: Maxigas

The Critique of Infrastructural Ideologies: A Multiscalar Approach

Infrastructural ideologies is a theoretical framework for understanding the production of political subjects and technological sovereignty in second, flexible, liquid modernity. Media and control infrastructures structure space and time to distribute power in particular ways. Subjects are produced by infrastructural effects depending on a symbolic order and material configurations that serve partial interests.

Investigating infrastructural ideologies allows scholars and activists to ask a number of questions that can both generate critical insights and lead to policy interventions. In this talk, I illustrate how this works in the context of the critical infrastructure lab on the local urban/rural, national, regional (EU) and global scales. Linking theoretical elaboration with work in public policy serves to highlight the strategic importance and political consequences of conceptual approaches.

Infrastructures are distinguished from other media objects by their scale and complexity that foregrounds the requirement for interoperable and standardised interfaces. Two empirical examples are 5G networks and data centres, called programmable infrastructures. I focus on their public interest and environmental aspects. Drawing on critical human geography and cultural political economy, I show how social conflicts around emerging technologies evolve at the collision of different scales.

Therefore, contestations of infrastructural power should traverse spatial dimensions.

Session 1

Zoe Horn: On Automation, Format and the Infrastructural Form

Formats represent the necessary forms of structuring and delivering that coordinate between digital infrastructures and their users. This presentation will examine how ‘experimental’ automated retail stores powered by technology like Amazon’s “Just Walk Out’’ can be understood as ‘formats’ – fully realized configurations of standards, practices and politics whose operations reproduce, displace, process, and reflect ontological distinctions that register new forms of labour and life. In thinking through the concept of format, we will consider how digital infrastructures ‘deliver’ forms of automation shaped as much by the competition and contingency of global power, politics, and money as the smooth and frictionless architectures of cybernetic operation.

Isabelle Boisvert: The Blurring of Hearing Technology Categories 

Technological advances in earphones and mobile devices are reshaping how societies conceptualise hearing aids, hearing compensation, and hearing augmentation. Amalgamating with the evolving digital hearing aid technologies, devices such as AirPods pro and a range of new “hearables” can now provide individuals with both improved hearing and access to remote audio streams. These technologies are rapidly reconfiguring approaches to deafness and hearing care. Because of their reliance on integrated microphones, their location close to the mouth and brain, and their potential to integrate other electrodes to capture physiological responses, ear-worn devices can gather extensive personal data to guide health and wellbeing services. These tech advances have led new developers with broad interests in personal data, such as Google and Meta, to the field of hearing health. Challenges raised by these technological advances require a considered multidisciplinary and multilayered reflection related to the scope and development of different regulations, data privacy, professional spaces, and access to trusted health services, information and products.  

Luke Munn: Technical Territories

Territories are being reworked. If territories were once a bounded power container, that container is now shot through with the signals and circuits of information infrastructures. Undersea cables blaze high wattage trails through the ocean, delivering media, merging markets, and stitching together zones of connectivity. Data centers act as a nexus, interconnecting partners, channeling data points into pools, and mining these massive repositories for insights. These technical operations offer new vectors for territorialization, allowing it to be extended and reshaped. The stable line of the border may persist, but it is overlaid with more flexible and fluid configurations of power.

Drawing on my recent book, this talk explores “technical territories.” It examines how layers of infrastructure come together to create forms of spatialized power. It traces how these technical territories intersect with existing formations and spill over borders, creating strange new topologies. But, above all, it investigates how these territories touch down at the level of the individual, altering the abilities and experiences of their inhabitants. It moves from sand miners in Singapore to asylum-seekers on Christmas Island and protestors in Hong Kong, pointing to the kinds of forces wielded against lives and livelihoods. Technical territories construct new zones where subjects are assembled, rights are undermined, labor is coordinated, and capital is extracted.

Session 2

Jenna Harb: Digital Humanitarian Labour: A Feminist Technoscience Approach to Repair Work and Aid Infrastructures

Jenna’s presentation draws on a multi-sited ethnography of crisis response in Lebanon to examine “repair work” (Steve Jackson, 2014). She reveals how frontline workers, community members, and recipients engage in repair work on the ground that sustains the delivery of aid in light of issues posed by digitising humanitarian infrastructures, in particular the digitisation of ID registration, cash assistance, and vulnerability targeting. Surveillance logics and gendering processes constituted by such digitisation are generative of critical labour that is behind the scenes, treated as peripheral, and undervalued. These findings exemplify Jasbir Puar’s conceptualisation of “assemblage” (2012), which sheds light on how inequality operates within interlocking systems of oppression and geopolitical forces rather than solely on bodies identified as “different.” By applying a feminist-inspired lens to repair work, this presentation hopes to spur a discussion on how breakdown related to infrastructure can be used to empirically study inequality and its intersectional contours.

Michael Richardson: Digital Twins and the Logistical Mode of Prediction

Digital twins have been touted as the next and best permutation of technological ‘smartness’, capturing considerable public and private investment globally. This paper shows how they strap digital infrastructures and interfaces to techniques of modelling and forecasting to produce a logistical mode of prediction that is indebted to both Cold War thinking and contemporary datafication and computation.

D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye: Culture, Infrastructure, Platform: More Passion, More Energy, More Footwork

The concepts of (digital) platform and (digital) infrastructure have been widely used, yet the relations between them can be considered more coherently by showing how “platformisation” might be understood in terms of its impacts on information infrastructure, including on the principles of openness and generativity underlying early internet architecture, and potential further effects on media and culture deriving from those impacts. To develop this perspective, we add legal studies to articulate these principles in ways media studies and STS have not; we understand infrastructures as resources subject to political contestation; and via the work of Julie Cohen, interpret digital platforms as strategies for disciplining infrastructures. Our case study of online music’s chaotic experiments to a thoroughly platformised environment shows how our approach compliments the political economy of media and internet governance research. This case study is part of a larger investigation into how music culture may (or may not) be changing in an era of digital platforms and streaming. 

Please note that while efforts are made to deliver the program as published, the program may change without notice.