A Sociology of Interdisciplinarity

In building upon the cases presented in Chaps. 10.1007/978-3-030-88455-0_2, 10.1007/978-3-030-88455-0_3, and 10.1007/978-3-030-88455-0_4, we develop a Sociology of Interdisciplinarity that draws our empirical insights together with resources from Science and Technology Studies (STS), in addition to Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, Research Policy, Infrastructure Studies, Anthropology, and Philosophy of Science. The key novelty of this framework is using STS insights to unpick the dynamics and consequences of interdisciplinary science, which distinguishes us from decades of earlier interdisciplinarity studies and gaps in understanding. Moreover, we not only focus on individual scholars and their experiences but pay careful attention to the wider contexts of interdisciplinary research, such as the impacts of funding structures, different access to resources, and power relations. We are careful in our approach so that our units of analyses—which vary from research groups and projects to whole epistemic communities and research policies—are most appropriate for the problem definitions that we put forward. The framework rests on a set of six dimensions, which we discuss in relation to current debates in the literature and our empirical analyses.

Gendered infrastructure and liminal space in Delhi’s unauthorized colonies

This paper takes an embodied approach to the lived experiences and everyday politics of liminal neighborhoods and infrastructures in Delhi’s unauthorized colonies, which lack official entitlements to networked infrastructures such as water and sewerage. Bringing a feminist political ecology lens to critical infrastructure studies, I show how gendered social relations, subjectivities, and the unequal experience of urban liminality are tied to accessing water and its fragmented infrastructures beyond the network. In particular, liminal infrastructural space is produced in unauthorized colonies through not only these neighborhoods’ quasi-legal status and unequal access to urban water, but also through gendered discourses and the socially differentiated ways water infrastructures are co-produced, managed, and made livable by residents. As water is primarily accessed beyond the network via tubewells and tankers, I demonstrate how these fractured modalities ultimately constitute gendered infrastructural assemblages that enable water’s circulation across neighborhoods but also serve to deepen forms of gendered marginality and differentiation. Here, gendered infrastructural practices and labor to negotiate and supplement fragmented components of water infrastructure shape subjectivities and possibilities for social relations and urban claims-making. These infrastructural assemblages expose both the situated experience of urban liminality, as well as its transcendent possibilities.

Platform Battlefield

Platforms are transforming society, economy, and politics and becoming essential infrastructures of our lives. In this way, digital spaces overlap with other spatialities, urban areas in particular. This process is not peaceful but generates bottlenecks, resistances, and oppositions. In this article, we propose to combine platform studies with infrastructure studies to frame the capacity of such enterprises to build new urban postindustrial environments. We focus on the potential conflicts emerging in the face of the growing platformization and sketch the outlines of a counter-platform politics.

IMAGINING ALTERNATIVE MEDIATED FUTURES? REFLECTIONS ON EXPERIMENTAL WORKSHOPS WITH YOUNG PEOPLE

Imagining alternatives to the thoroughly networked contemporary everyday is not easy. In our research project, we tackled this problem by developing an ‘imagining workshop’ method and applying it in an experimental study with young people. In this paper, we present methodological reflections based on these imagining experiments. Our paper contributes to nascent research that explores and experiments with so-called speculative methods in the field of critical media and infrastructure studies. We are interested in whether the dynamic of hegemony that actualizes in mediated daily practices can be questioned, and alternatives imagined to ‘how things are’. We seek to do this by bringing together perspectives from speculative fiction and critical media infrastructure studies. Our key methodological question is: “how could we as researchers create interventionist methods to spark imagination and inspire (self-)reflective thinking in people about their mediated everyday?” In the paper, we highlight two major observations from the workshops. First, while projecting alternatives to future mediated everyday proved challenging for the participants, it sparked vibrant discussions on the contemporary networked society’s bleak sides. A challenge we observed is that the act of imagining does not necessarily mean that what is co-produced in playful workshop settings are counter-hegemonic narratives of the future. Second, our study highlights that young people have concerns about their mediated everyday life, and these concerns emphasize the need to actively seek alternatives to ‘how things are’. The concerns were related to privacy and dataveillance, and lack of safe online spaces, fairly manufactured devices, and possibilities to disconnect.

Digital platforms as entangled infrastructures: Addressing public values and trust in messaging apps

Digital platforms have increasingly become accepted and trusted by European citizens as indispensable utilities for social interaction and communication in everyday life. This article aims to analyze how trust in and dependence of these ubiquitous platforms for mediated communication is configured and the kind of consequences this has for user (dis)empowerment and public values. Our analysis builds on insights from the domestication perspective and infrastructure studies. In order to illustrate our conceptual approach, we use the case of messaging apps. We demonstrate how these apps as an essential social infrastructure are entangled with a corporate-computational infrastructure. The entangling of both types of infrastructures leads to a paradox where users feel compelled to appropriate these socially indispensable apps in everyday life, while also making them dependent on their corporate control mechanisms. In order to get out of the paradox and empower users these infrastructures and their data sharing need to be disentangled. For this, we apply the notion of ‘infrastructural inversion’ as a way to surface opaque and hidden properties of the digital platforms. We conclude with a discussion of potential other routes for infrastructural inversion in order to establish data disentanglement that serves public interest values.

Geographies of infrastructure III: Infrastructure with Chinese characteristics

For 25 years, China has staked its development on domestic and global infrastructure expansion. This third progress report on geographies of infrastructure explores what China’s far-reaching infrastructure venture means for critical infrastructure studies. Reviewing China’s infrastructure-driven urban growth, the Belt and Road Initiative and their links, three recommendations are advanced: (1) a reengagement with the state that takes its geographical and temporal diversity seriously, (2) an approach to infrastructure as part of a complex network of state projects with long-term ends, and (3) a concern with infrastructures of repression and confinement in wider processes of making things ‘flow’.

Prediction of future passenger intensity assigning in the directions and time slots

This paper is focused on the prediction of passenger intensity on the Ostrava – Valasske Mezirici railway line in Moravian-Silesian Region, Czech Republic. The paper analyses available transport data about passenger behaviour. Data describes assigning passengers to appropriate directions and time slots in detail, emphasis is placed on daily and weekly variation of travel demand. Based on the provided travel behaviour researches, a model of assigning passenger intensity was designed. Travel surveys and available data sources from realized infrastructure studies were used. The prediction is harmonized with local specific conditions and proceeds from travel behaviour in previous years. The obtained assigning of passenger demand was exploited when designing a new operating concept for the suburban rail in the area. A model composition of the vehicle units and the frequency of connections in the respective sessions were suggested based on the obtained data.

Decrypting Aadhaar

The topic of Aadhaar links with the Indians in various ways. Aadhaar can be thought of as a digital infrastructure that has been an enabler and disabler in its ways. I exploresome of these ways through my article. I tried to question the proposition of introducing Aadhaar and carefully studied its theoretical bene?ts. Furthermore, I wish to explore the abominable ways in which welfare, particularly the issues, has changed with the integration of Aadhaar. We shall refer to the various themes in infrastructure studies and Foucault's works. In this research, I try to link my analysis with the major themes explored from a shared pool of resources.

Inventing ‘infrastructure’: tracing the etymological blueprint of an omnipresent sociotechnical metaphor

This article proposes an archaeology of the concept of ‘infrastructure’, focusing specifically on a period ranging from 1842 until 1951, before the term entered the English language from French. In doing so, it contributes to an ongoing discussion on ‘What does infrastructure really mean?’ by deconstructing the omnipresent concept of ‘infrastructure’ as an expression of modernity that has crystallised a sociotechnical imaginary: a relation between technology, space and power. Indeed, our understanding of its etymological, epistemological and intellectual origins is patchy, based on repeated chronological mistakes and conceptual misunderstandings. To put it bluntly: we do not know how the word came to be. By unearthing the origins of ‘infrastructure’, this article aims to contribute to scholarly debates on the definition(s) of infrastructure in social sciences, urban studies, science and technology studies and infrastructure studies. It also wishes to contribute to ongoing debates taking place in the public sphere regarding what should count as ‘infrastructure’. This paper’s findings demonstrate a clear relation to Karl Marx’s ‘historical materialism’; the paper also analyses how the word evolved over a short period of time to become sociotechnical metaphor; finally, the paper demonstrates the emergence of a concept that linked engineering to larger socioeconomic concerns in the 1890s, well before the emergence of ‘infrastructure’ as a key concept of development economics in the 1950s.