[Air-L] Call for abstracts: Infrastructuring AI. A view from the Global South

[Iginio Gagliardone]

** Call for abstracts **

Infrastructuring AI. A view from the Global South / STS Italia Conference
Milan, Italy, 11-13 June 2025.

Panel organisers: Iginio Gagliardone, Wits University; Stefania Milan,
University of Amsterdam


Unprecedented efforts are underway to harness Artificial Intelligence (AI)
“for good”. Unlike earlier initiatives using digital technologies to spur
economic growth and improve service delivery, this new wave of digital
innovation is fraught with ambivalence and complexity. While familiar
narratives persist—portraying low-income countries as needing to “catch
up”— new dynamics are surfacing. These include pushback against top-down
innovation and fresh visions of the Global South’s role in digital
transformation. These tensions— rooted both in lived experiences and
conceptual innovations —reflect the evolving stakes of digital progress.

Many individuals and groups have experienced first-hand the dramatic fading
of the expectations digital tools will serve as “liberation technologies”.
They have also long questioned the promises of benevolent connectedness or
entrepreneurship made by large tech corporations, whose hypocrisy has been
dramatically exposed by a steady stream of leaks— from former Facebook
employee Francis Haugen to Uber executive Mark MacGann.

Conceptually, innovative scholarship emerging at the intersection of
Science and Technology Studies (STS), decolonial theory, and “computing
in/from the South” is giving visibility both to legacies of colonial
domination and to locally rooted forms of imagination and innovation. These
reinvigorated efforts at decolonizing scholarship, as well as tech
infrastructures and platforms, has begun offering new frameworks to
interpret technological development. They challenge persistent stereotypes
of low-income countries being condemned to uncritically replicate
innovations from the Global North, while stressing new forms of agency in
imagining distinct technological futures. With respect to AI, this means
paying attention to “ground realities”, centering the understanding of AI
in the experiences and standpoints of particular geographies and
communities, and in their histories.

To account for the complex interactions and the effects of these forces,
this panel ask three orders of questions, accounting for infrastructure
evolution, methods, and epistemological questions.



First, this panel seeks to analyse applications of AI as they interface
with pre-existing infrastructures, and thus need to relate to long term
trajectories of innovation, as well to

localised visions and materialities. For example, how do AI-powered
surveillance interact with existing forms of control and policing? How
electricity- and water-hungry data centres emerge in countries struggling
to provide these basic services to their citizens? Do legacy
infrastructures deployed by specific external actors (e.g. US or Chinese
companies) make it more likely to acquire AI-powered solutions from the
same sources?



>From a methodological standpoint, we welcome studies that are able to
critically interrogate processes of innovation, follow the multiple cycles
through which power and technology interact, disclosing opportunities for
some, but silently excluding others.

Finally, from an epistemological perspective, we invite colleagues to
explore how we can rethink the relation between AI and infrastructure from
a Global South perspective. What theoretical building blocks can help to
expand the rubric of STS for the Majority World? Here we seek to go beyond
case studies to expand the theoretical toolbox of the discipline.

For submission guidelines and panel details (panel no. 55) visit:
https://stsitalia.org/call-for-abstracts/#theme

Deadline for submissions: 3 February 2025