[Air-L] CfP AAA2018 San Jose: Panel Digital Infrastructures

[Plets, G.F.J. (Gertjan)]

Dear Colleagues,

Please find our CfP for our session on digital infrastructures at the annual conference of the American Association of Anthropologists (San Jose 14-18 November 2018) below. Scholars from various disciplines are invited to submit an abstract!

GJ

Digital Infrastructures: Poetics, Politics and Personhood - AAA San Jose 14-18 November 2018
Lorraine Weekes (Stanford University)
Gertjan Plets (Utrecht University)

Government databases, digital archives, online voting systems, and e-portals enabling the submission of everything from insurance claims to income tax returns increasingly define mundane engagements between citizen-users and a suite of public and private institutions across social arenas. Because of efficiency and transparency digital technologies are seen as affording, reliance on digital infrastructures has become widely supported on the ground. At the same time, sociopolitical structures and assumptions encoded in many of these infrastructures—and the entanglements they produce—have received little attention. The tendency of infrastructure to remain invisible until something goes wrong is perhaps especially acute in digital and high-tech contexts where the scale, technological complexity, and physical diffusion encourages black boxing. By putting the politics and poetics of digital infrastructure into the limelight, this panel will consider the historical and ethnographic dimensions of digital infrastructures and how they produce individual subjectivities, mediate power relationships and further existing reifications of the social across the globe. By bringing the theoretical insights of the burgeoning anthropology of infrastructure and bureaucracy to bear on the digital networks and assemblages, the papers in this panel endeavor to make the materiality, social-embeddedness, and historical contingency of digital infrastructure visible.

Please submit an abstract before April 2 or send enquiries to g.f.j.plets at uu.nl<mailto:g.f.j.plets at uu.nl>

Dr. Gertjan Plets | Assistant Professor Cultural Heritage | Department of History and Art History |
Utrecht University | Drift 6, 3512 BS Utrecht | https://uu.academia.edu/GertjanPlets