[Commlist] IJoC Publishes a Special Section on Digital Infrastructure, Liminality, and World-Making Via Asia

International Journal of Communication Publishes a Special Section on
Digital Infrastructure, Liminality, and World-Making Via Asia

Digital and "smart" infrastructures have been considered hallmarks of an
ever more globalized future. They promise limitless, ubiquitous connectivity
and radically inclusive data-driven governance that knows no outside. Yet
how do these infrastructures remain invested with liminality? This Special
Section on Digital Infrastructure, Liminality, and World-Making Via Asia,
​guest-edited by Rolien Hoyng,​ explores the role of liminality in
infrastructural world-making at the very moment that the future of
globalization appears less certain. Engaging the conjunction of imagined
endings and beginnings, this special issue does not situate itself in Asia
per se, but traces infrastructures running "via Asia" that produce the
spaces of Asia and beyond, its borders, and its extensions.
The introduction outlines key dynamics of power and political possibility in
digital infrastructure by discussing the "infrastructural politics of
liminality." The material multiplicity of infrastructures and the fact that
they touch on something external that they do not fully control spur
tensions and paradoxes of integration and disruption, convergence and
excess. Infrastructural integration and data's homolingualism should not be
taken for granted but considered as sites of struggle. At every switch or
extension, human and non-human, social and material forms of resistance can
put smooth connectivity and infrastructural integrity in peril but also
generate new socio-technical organizations.
Eight authors explore various instances of liminality and their political
import. They underscore boundaries and blockades in the logistical networks
of both block trains and blockchains in China's Belt and Road Initiative.
They consider electronic waste processing and slow violence in the blind
spots of our digitally surveilled world. They investigate the failure of
smart city projects in India—which, however, does not stand in the way of
extraction of value but gives way to financial and algorithmic speculation.

Several authors unpack the coalescence and mutual affection between state
power and digital infrastructure and the ways in which "leaky," excessive
communication is not simply liminal vis-a-vis state power but reinforces it
through repression of dissent. Last, turning to political possibility, other
authors explore socio-technical invention, in relation to food waste in Hong
Kong, as well as tactical appropriation of security and logistical
infrastructures by pro-refugee activists at the border of West Asia.
We invite you to read these articles that published in the International
Journal of Communication on June 7, 2021. Please log into ijoc.org to read
the papers of interest. We look forward to your feedback! 
_________________________________________________

Digital Infrastructure, Liminality, and World-Making Via Asia: The
Infrastructural Politics of Liminality—Introduction
Rolien Hoyng

On the Block Train: Rethinking Block Technologies on the YuXinOu Express
Tsvetelina Hristova, Brett Neilson, Ned Rossiter

Laboring in Electronic and Digital Waste Infrastructures: Colonial
Temporalities of Violence in Asia
Evelyn Wan

Infrastructures of Extraction in the Smart City: Zones, Finance, and
Platforms in New Town Kolkata
Ilia Antenucci

Gateways, Sieves, and Domes: On the Infrastructural Topology of the Chinese
Stack Gabriele de Seta

(Dis)information Blackouts: Politics and Practices of Internet Shutdowns
Nishant Shah

Listening to Noise: Breadline—Food Rescue as System of Interruption
Daisy Tam

Resonant Ecologies: Reading Solidarity Transversally in the Mediterranean
Sea
Monika Halkort
_________________________________________________

Larry Gross, Editor
Arlene Luck, Founding Managing Editor  Kady Bell-Garcia, Managing Editor
Kasia Anderson, Managing Editor, Special Sections
Rolien Hoyng, Guest Editor

According to the latest statistics from Google Scholar, IJoC ranks 3rd among
all Humanities, Literature & Arts journals, and 5th among all Communication
journals.      ___________________________________________________
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