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←call for papers Open Panel “Exploring, doing, and making infrastructural ideologies that center limits, reduction, and redistribution” at EASST-4S conference, Amsterdam july 2024
The world is burning, but in and from the ashes a new world will be built. A new world needs new ideologies to inform subjectivity, organization, and materiality. In this panel we will interrogate experimental approaches to infrastructural ideologies that center limits, redistribution, and reduction.
The climate crisis, planetary scarcity, human limitations, and (geo)political conflicts force us to rethink transnational communication infrastructures to overcome their extractive, colonial, and imperialist tendencies. As policymakers, researchers, citizens, artists, users, and industry, it becomes increasingly hard to know and act in and through increasingly complex, layered, and entangled networks. To ensure that new infrastructures serve the public interest and contribute to social, economic, and environmental stability, we see an urgent need to develop alternative propositions for sustainable and equitable internet and digital technologies. Specifically, in this combined open panel we are responding to the need to articulate new ideologies, set a positive agenda, to inform subjectivity, organization, and materiality. In this combined format open panel we will interrogate theoretical, empirical, and speculative approaches to infrastructural ideologies that center limits, redistribution, and reduction over extraction, profit, and capital.
Since the internet has become the scaffolding of everyday life, there is a clear need to think and build beyond the principles of openness, interconnections, and networks. Now is the time to develop and prototype narratives about internet infrastructures that center people and the planet over profit and capital. Because an ideology cannot consist of text alone, this combined open panel will combine academic presentations, with a workshop and an interactive immersive experience.
This panel builds on the open panel ‘Overcoming Sociotechnical Imaginaries: infrastructural ideologies and materialities?’ organized at 4S 2023 in Honolulu and is in conversation with a growing body of work across – but not limited to – STS, media studies, infrastructure studies, and critical internet studies.
We encourage a diversity of submissions to help think through the complexity of today and develop new ideologies. These submissions can include but are not limited to, academic papers, essays, speculative fiction, solar punk, technology, code, and artistic interventions and installations.
