[Commlist] Call for abstracts: Infrastructuring AI. A view from the Global South

** Call for abstracts **

Infrastructuring AI. A view from the Global South / STS Italia 
Conference Milan, Italy, 11-13 June 2025.

Panel organisers: Iginio Gagliardone, Wits University; Stefania Milan, 
University of Amsterdam


Unprecedented efforts are underway to harness Artificial Intelligence 
(AI) “for good”. Unlike earlier initiatives using digital technologies 
to spur economic growth and improve service delivery, this new wave of 
digital innovation is fraught with ambivalence and complexity. While 
familiar narratives persist—portraying low-income countries as needing 
to “catch up”— new dynamics are surfacing. These include pushback 
against top-down innovation and fresh visions of the Global South’s role 
in digital transformation. These tensions— rooted both in lived 
experiences and conceptual innovations —reflect the evolving stakes of 
digital progress.

Many individuals and groups have experienced first-hand the dramatic 
fading of the expectations digital tools will serve as “liberation 
technologies”. They have also long questioned the promises of benevolent 
connectedness or entrepreneurship made by large tech corporations, whose 
hypocrisy has been dramatically exposed by a steady stream of leaks— 
from former Facebook employee Francis Haugen to Uber executive Mark MacGann.

Conceptually, innovative scholarship emerging at the intersection of 
Science and Technology Studies (STS), decolonial theory, and “computing 
in/from the South” is giving visibility both to legacies of colonial 
domination and to locally rooted forms of imagination and innovation. 
These reinvigorated efforts at decolonizing scholarship, as well as tech 
infrastructures and platforms, has begun offering new frameworks to 
interpret technological development. They challenge persistent 
stereotypes of low-income countries being condemned to uncritically 
replicate innovations from the Global North, while stressing new forms 
of agency in imagining distinct technological futures. With respect to 
AI, this means paying attention to “ground realities”, centering the 
understanding of AI in the experiences and standpoints of particular 
geographies and communities, and in their histories.

To account for the complex interactions and the effects of these forces, 
this panel ask three orders of questions, accounting for infrastructure 
evolution, methods, and epistemological questions.

First, this panel seeks to analyse applications of AI as they interface 
with pre-existing infrastructures, and thus need to relate to long term 
trajectories of innovation, as well to

localised visions and materialities. For example, how do AI-powered 
surveillance interact with existing forms of control and policing? How 
electricity- and water-hungry data centres emerge in countries 
struggling to provide these basic services to their citizens? Do legacy 
infrastructures deployed by specific external actors (e.g. US or Chinese 
companies) make it more likely to acquire AI-powered solutions from the 
same sources?

 From a methodological standpoint, we welcome studies that are able to 
critically interrogate processes of innovation, follow the multiple 
cycles through which power and technology interact, disclosing 
opportunities for some, but silently excluding others.

Finally, from an epistemological perspective, we invite colleagues to 
explore how we can rethink the relation between AI and infrastructure 
from a Global South perspective. What theoretical building blocks can 
help to expand the rubric of STS for the Majority World? Here we seek to 
go beyond case studies to expand the theoretical toolbox of the discipline.

For submission guidelines and panel details (panel no. 55) visit: 
https://stsitalia.org/call-for-abstracts/#theme 
<https://stsitalia.org/call-for-abstracts/#theme>

Deadline for submissions: 3 February 2025

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