[Air-L] CFP: Infrastructural Politics

[Blake Hallinan]

Call for Papers: Special Issue of *Cultural Studies* on Infrastructural
Politics

Greetings, all:

We are pleased to announce a call for papers of a special issue of *Cultural
Studies* on "Infrastructural Politics." The deadline for 500-word abstracts
if November 15, 2018. The full call is pasted below or available here:
https://jamesngilmore.com/2018/07/24/special-issue-on-infrastructural-politics/
.

Best,

Blake Hallinan & James Gilmore

------

Call for Papers:

Special Issue of *Cultural Studies *on Infrastructural Politics



Issue Editors:



Blake Hallinan

Ph.D. Candidate

Department of Communication

University of Colorado Boulder



James N. Gilmore

Assistant Professor

Department of Communication

Clemson University



John Durham Peters’ 2015 book *The Marvelous Clouds* develops the
concept *infrastructuralism
*to describe a fascination “for the basic, the boring, the mundane, and all
the mischievous work done behind the scenes” that contributes to a sense of
the unremarkable (p. 34). Classic studies explored electric power (Hughes,
1988) and transportation systems (Innis, 1950), while more recent academic
work has explored the unremarkable systems that have been architected to
help sustain and form information technologies, including Nicole
Starosielski’s history of undersea cables (2015), Eden Medina’s history of
cybernetic systems in Allende’s Chile (2011), and Benjamin Peters’ history
of the Soviet Internet (2017). Relatedly, there have been a growing number
of calls to recognize the centrality of data for forming subjectivities and
organizing the world (Striphas, 2011; van Dijck, 2013; Andrejevic, Hearn
and Kennedy, 2015; Pasquale, 2015; Beer, 2016; O’Neil, 2016;
Cheney-Lippold, 2017; Tufekci, 2017; Vaidhyanathan, 2018; Bowker, 2018;
Noble, 2018; Plantin *et al.*, 2018). These and other studies demonstrate
that significant attention needs to be paid to the design and
implementation of material and immaterial data infrastructures,
infrastructures that help make possible the production, dissemination, and
circulation of culture.



Infrastructure is never simply a neutral conduit or platform; it always has
a politics, shaping the arrangements of power and authority in human
associations and the activities within those arrangements (Winner, 1986).
Generally, the point of infrastructure is to be constructive and
supportive, but what exactly is being constructed and supported is not
always so readily apparent. As work on socio-technical systems has shown,
understanding the significance of technology requires attention to the
technology itself but also to the ways technology enrolls people, places,
systems, and interests. This broader understanding of the politics of
platforms has been adopted by academic researchers (Gillespie, 2010, 2017),
while simultaneously animating the aspirations of many leading technology
companies—consider Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of creating a global community
atop the foundation of Facebook as a prominent example (Zuckerberg, 2017;
Swisher, 2018). Understanding, for instance, the construction of social
networking sites alongside communities connects arrangements of data to
arrangements of power and draws attention to related issues of ownership,
access, transparency, accountability, accuracy, justice, and control, and
how these arrangements shift over time and across contexts (Bowker and
Star, 1999; Couldry and van Dijck, 2015; Pasquale, 2015; Peters, 2015, p.
2; van Doorn, 2017).



We seek contributions for a special issue of *Cultural Studies *exploring
the relationships between data, infrastructure, and politics, and how those
relationships affect the study of culture. Cultural Studies can
significantly address and engage the growing challenges of such a
“constructive politics of infrastructures.” Cultural Studies’ investment in
the articulation of politics, culture, and “everything that is not
culture” (Thompson,
1961) provides an important—and, to date, underutilized—framework for
analyzing the degree to which data, technologies, and infrastructures are
rearticulating configurations of power and affecting lived experience.



Potential contributors to this volume should submit a 500-word abstract
outlining their object(s) of study, their research approach, and how their
potential article draws on and extends the traditions, approaches, and
projects of Cultural Studies.



When submitting a proposal, please include name, affiliation, and contact
information in the document, and send submissions as a PDF to co-editors
Blake Hallinan (blake.hallinan at colorado.edu) and James N. Gilmore (
jngilmo at clemson.edu).



Submissions should be received by November 15, 2018 for review. Authors
will be notified if proposals are accepted within a month of the deadline.
If accepted, full articles will be provisionally due to the special issue
editors by July 15, 2019. In order to be deemed publishable in the special
issue, all articles will undergo both editorial and blind peer review. All
articles must adhere to the *formatting requirements*
<https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=rcus20&page=instructions#Style_guidelines>
of *Cultural Studies *to avoid rejection.



Please direct all queries or concerns ahead of submission to both special
issue editors.



Topics may include but are not limited to:



·      Infrastructuralism as a way of thinking, distinct from
structuralism, post-structuralism, and other relevant intellectual movements

·      Infrastructure’s implications for state politics, elections, protest
movements, and other modes of political activism

·      How marginalized groups utilize infrastructure to mobilize resistive
politics .

·      How data-based digital technologies challenge the epistemology of
media and cultural studies

·      The relationship between network infrastructures and colonization
projects around the globe

·      Media ecological studies that position cultural politics alongside
environmental issues

·      The infrastructures of emergent surveillance systems, such as
Amazon’s facial recognition program

·      How the mundanity of infrastructure relates to larger operations of
power and authority