Oral Presentation Session - Cosponsored Status Awarded

Sponsored by: Association for the Anthropology of Policy

Cosponsored by: Central States Anthropological Society

Of interest to: Teachers of Anthropology in Community Colleges, Students

Primary Theme: Technology

Secondary Theme: Citizenship

(5-0355) Digital Infrastructures: Poetics, Politics and Personhood

Government databases, digital archives, on line voting systems, and e-portals enabling us to submit e.g. insurance claims or tax paperwork increasingly defines mundane engagements between citizens and the suite of public and private players defining social arenas. Because of affordances such as efficiency and transparency attributed to digital technology, implementation of these 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.

Organizer(s)

• Gertjan Plets

  Assistant Professor
  Utrecht University

Discussant(s)

• Gertjan Plets

  Assistant Professor
  Utrecht University

Presenter(s)

• Gertjan Plets

  Assistant Professor
  Utrecht University

Organizer(s)

• A. Lorraine Weekes

  Doctoral Candidate
  Stanford University

Chair(s)

• A. Lorraine Weekes

  Doctoral Candidate
  Stanford University

Presenter(s)

• A. Lorraine Weekes

  Doctoral Candidate
  Stanford University

• Michael Prentice

  Lecturer
  Brandeis University

• Kristin Skrabut

  Assistant Professor of Urban Policy and Anthropology
  Tufts University

• Zehra Hashmi

  University of Michigan

Presentations:

• 10:15 AM - 10:30 AM

  Introducing digital infrastructures: concepts, ideas and a case study from Flanders
  Gertjan Plets – Utrecht University
• 10:30 AM - 10:45 AM

  Country as a Service: Infrastructure, Agency, and Political Subjectivity in e-Estonia
  A. Lorraine Weekes – Stanford University
• 10:45 AM - 11:00 AM

  Keeping Documents Inside: Digital Surveillance Infrastructures in Corporate Korea
  Michael Prentice – Brandeis University
• 11:00 AM - 11:15 AM

  Mediating Bureaucracy and Digital Gatekeepers in Urban Peru
  Kristin J. Skrabut – Tufts University
• 11:15 AM - 11:30 AM

  Datafied Kinship: Identification, Governance and Belonging in Urban Pakistan
  Zehra Hashmi – University of Michigan
• 11:30 AM - 11:45 AM

  Discussion
  Gertjan Plets – Utrecht University