We invite abstracts for the 7th Innovation in Information Infrastructures (III) workshop.
The III workshops have their roots in the 1990s in a convergence of interests amongst European and US researchers investigating the growth and increasing salience of enduring complex information technology assemblages that could not be adequately captured by prevalent terminologies of information systems. Such information infrastructures (sometimes termed cyber-infrastructures and knowledge infrastructures) shared some common features (Star and Ruhleder 1996)–erected over an extended period upon an installed base of information practices and technological components. Scholars from cognate traditions within science, technology and innovation studies, information systems, and organization studies came together, united by a concern to critically engage with these developments. This led to a successful series of informal research workshops, which culminated in a number of journal special editions.i The history of these events can be found here.
The 7th III workshop builds on that early productive engagement and its distinctive analytical style: fiercely empirical; conceptually dynamic with a focus on mid-range theory; paying detailed attention to the material; engaging with both immediate and broader, longer-term developments; concerned with how things might be done otherwise; interested in power, structure and agency. Our interest in the forms of social order created and/or maintained through information infrastructures, prompted by the societal embedding of information infrastructures, their operation, and outcomes, is carried forward by our partnership with a sister community addressing Governance by Infrastructure.
The 6th III workshop (University of Surrey, September 2019) had a very specific focus on the critical relationship between Platform Ecosystems and Information Infrastructures. III 2024 will relaunch our interdisciplinary research community after an extended break resulting from the covid pandemic. We invite papers that engage with contemporary developments in a world of rapidly changing and increasing pervasive information infrastructures and systems integrated into routine, widely shared services.
We are seeking to promote analytic work that mobilises and resonates with the broad III approach outlined above in novel, interesting ways to empirically explore the landscape and manifestations of evolving digitalization in society. However, we are not seeking to reify any particular 'school' of infrastructure studies. Our ambition is accordingly inclusive: to recruit all scholars who may be interested in building upon and extending this productive tradition.
Workshop themes and indicative topics
We call for contributions related, but not limited to, the following themes – illustrated by a non-exclusive sample of indicative topics:
1. Governance of/by Information Infrastructures
- Mechanisms of governance in Information Infrastructures
- Expertise, epistemologies and public participation
- Information infrastructuring and governance of modernist institutions
2. Addressing Societal Challenges through Information Infrastructures
- Climate infrastructures and infrastructuring climate
- Infrastructuring healthcare
- Ageing in an infrastructural world
3. Approaches to Data & AI Informed by Information Infrastructure Perspectives
- Infrastructure perspectives on AI/data/datafication
- Information infrastructures perspectives for understanding the epistemic contribution of AI
- Instruments as an agenda to bring back materiality to data studies.
4. Infrastructuring of Platforms, Platformisation of Infrastructures
- Strategies for Architecting information infrastructures
- Orchestration, governance and strategy in data-intensive digital ecosystems
- Digital/data platforms: III insights that conventional platform ecosystem literature easily misses?
5. Concepts and Methodologies Relevant to Infrastructure-Informed Studies
- What methodological implications follow from adhering to infrastructure perspectives analytically?
- Embedded approaches to studying information infrastructures - Fieldwork by Field Actors
- Infrastructured pedagogies
Important dates
- Submission process opened: 1st February 2024
- Deadline for submission of abstracts: 31st May 2024
- Notification of acceptance of abstracts: 30th June 2024
- Deadline for authors of accepted abstracts to confirm participation: 31st July 2024
- Final programme available: 12th August 2024
- Conference registration: 1st September 2024
- Workshop: 16th-18th September 2024
Workshop website: https://www.esade.edu/en/IIIWorkshop2024
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Eric Monteiro
Norwegian University of Sciene and Technology (NTNU)
Trondheim
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