Infrastructures/STS approaches
Digital public infrastructures and digital public goods are the new buzzword in international development and policy circles. While infrastructures have been a widely studied concept and also a methodological approach in STS, digital public infrastructures reinvigorate new debates around the same. Infrastructure that typically exists in the background as invisible and is frequently taken for granted (Star & Ruhleder, 1994) has sprung to the forefront of all public discussions, political speeches and policy debates. Meanwhile, the proliferation of digital technologies is fostering the emergence of infrastructures that tend to challenge the boundaries between what is termed “public” and “private”.
In this workshop, we will draw on the classic approaches of STS to analyse digitalisation as an infrastructural process, in different contexts and through the circulations to which it gives rise. We will explore the benefits of historical work on projects often framed as “disruptive”, in India and other countries. What are the material, technical and social organisations on which digital projects are based? How do they affect the allocation of power and resources within the societies concerned? What attempts are made to regulate these projects? How do these projects inspire or enable others?
Bidisha Chaudhuri is an Associate Professor in the domain of IT and Society and the academic coordinator of the M.Sc. (Digital Society) programme at IIIT Bangalore. She received her PhD from South Asia Institute at Heidelberg University, Germany. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on Science and Technology Studies, Digital Sociology and Technology Ethics. Her research interests include, technology and governance, technology and work and technology and ethics.
Laurène Le Cozanet is Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute. Her research focuses on government uses of digital technology and their regulation. She has worked on the history of personal data protection, combining STS, socio-history and sociology of law, and is also interested in interoperability policies. She is the co-winner of the 2022 Eicher Prize organised by the Institute for Research on Education, for her political science thesis on the “vocationalisation” of university programs, and has held postdoctoral positions at EHESS and CNAM (France).
Janaki Srinivasan is an Associate Professor in the domain of IT and Society at IIIT Bangalore. Her research examines the political economy of information technology-based development initiatives. She uses ethnographic research to examine how gender, caste and class shape the use of such technologies. Her work has explored these interests in the context of Indian digital inclusion initiatives focussed on community computer centres, mobile phones, identity systems and open information systems. Currently, she is exploring privacy, algorithmic control and the role of intermediaries in digital transactions, with an emphasis on the domains of financial inclusion and work automation. Janaki has a PhD in Information Management and Systems from UC Berkeley and Masters degrees in Physics and in Information Technology from IIT Delhi and IIIT Bangalore.
Vidya Subramanian is an Associate Professor and Associate Dean (Planning and Strategy) at ay Jindal Global Law School. Her research is loosely framed by two large issues: the first is the colonisation of the everyday so-called real world by the digital; and the second is how power permeates and is implicated in such technologies. Her work has straddled several academic fields such as Science, Technology, and Society (STS), Sociology, Media Studies, and Sports Studies. Prior to joining Jindal Global Law School, she has held postdoctoral positions at Harvard University and IIT Bombay, after having completed her PhD from the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) New Delhi.
Syllabus
- Session 1: Introduction to Infrastructure studies: A conceptual vocabulary
- Session 2: Politics of Infrastructure: Who, what and where is the public in digital public infrastructure?
- Session 3: Policy and Regulation of Digital Infrastructures
- Session 4: Empirical Cases: Digital Health / Digital Identity / Digital Payments
Learning Objectives
- To become familiar with the main concepts and approaches of STS – in particular infrastructure studies – likely to shed light on the contemporary development of digital technologies;
- To learn how to translate these approaches into an empirical research protocol capable of addressing all the dimensions required, in particular the political issues surrounding digital infrastructures;
- To use these approaches to develop comparisons between national contexts, between different uses of digital technology, etc.
- To explore emblematic case studies in depth, particularly from a historical perspective.