[Commlist] Call for Papers, Special Issue "Governance by Infrastructure", First Monday Summer 2023

Call for papers

Governance by Infrastructure
Special issue to be published open-access by First Monday: 
https://firstmonday.org <https://firstmonday.org>

Papers due: 23 December 2022
Publication: Summer 2023 (see calendar below)

In March 2022, the ISS and ISSTI jointly organized with the support of 
the Swiss NSF a workshop in Lausanne on the subject of Governance by 
Infrastructure: https://wp.unil.ch/workshopgbi/ 
<https://wp.unil.ch/workshopgbi/>.

With over 50 registered participants (30 on site) and 25 contributions, 
the workshop demonstrated a rich variety of interests and work in progress.

In 2023 we intend to consolidate the results of the workshop and open 
them to contributions
from new colleagues and institutions in order to prepare a follow-up 
workshop in 2024.

The original call, which still acts as a framework for the present call 
for papers for the special issue, is:

The governance of the large sociotechnical systems that invisibly power 
and support the social world has long been a focus of STS scholars. One 
may recall the work of Hughes (1983) on the electrification of America, 
Star and Bowker (1996) on classifications and standards, or Latour 
(1993) on the Berlin Key. When we speak of infrastructure, and as Bowker 
and colleagues (2010) note, we often think of large collections of 
materials necessary for human organization and activity, such as 
buildings, roads, bridges, and physical networks of communication. But 
beyond bricks, mortar, pipes, or wires, infrastructure also includes 
entities such as protocols, standards, or system architectures. These 
more abstract entities are part of infrastructure because they perform 
an infrastructural function. That is, they help to shape, enable or 
constrain our common life.
Starting from the classical studies of infrastructure, STS has developed 
a rich inquiry between computer and social scientists, charting the 
development of information infrastructures in various social contexts 
(Monteiro, Pollock and Williams, 2014). This research is complemented by 
at least two other research fields interested in infrastructure in its 
functional sense: platform studies and Internet studies. The first has 
been primarily concerned with large platforms such as Google, Facebook, 
Twitter, Uber, Airbnb or Wikipedia, sometimes with more localized 
cooperative platforms (Scholz, 2014; Plantin et al., 2018). The second 
has been mainly interested in the Internet itself of course, but also in 
Internet-based services, sometimes built in a technically distributed 
mode (Musiani and Dulong de Rosnay, 2016).
These different fields have opened question of governance and 
infrastructure. While some scholars explore the governance of platforms 
and infrastructures via institutions and regulation, others have engaged 
in a questioning of governance, where governance is understood as a set 
of dynamics of “social ordering” (Law, 1992) that does not take place 
exclusively, or even primarily, in politically designed institutions, 
but is also enacted through the ordinary practices of people engaged in 
maintaining or challenging the social order (Musiani, 2016). Branches of 
government, stakeholders and advocacy groups, policy makers, technology 
designers, platform companies or contractors, and users, all participate 
in governance. By focusing on governance by infrastructure, this 
workshop aims to interrogate how technologies, infrastructures, 
platforms, devices, algorithms, reflect and influence, meditate and 
translate ordering processes. The starting point is the technical object 
and the way in which it, in its design or in its uses, acts on the 
social order. We wish to understand how infrastructures lead to 
transformations of society, by bringing changes in governance, possibly 
embedded in their design.

The editorial team (coordinates below) is calling for contributions 
directly or indirectly related
to the subject of Governance by Infrastructure, possibly along lines 
such as:

Topics of interest (not limited to):
• Theoretical work on Information Infrastructures (IIs) and the concept 
of governance
• Design issues about governance and IIs
• Case studies of IIs or II< projects from the perspective of their 
governance, politics and
policies
• New methodological openings and critiques of existing methods in the 
study of IIs and
their governance
• Normative perspectives on the conditions of existence and the 
sustainability of IIs and
their governance

Authors are invited to submit a full paper, ready for review, until 23 
December 2022, by e-
mail to the full editorial team listed below.

Papers should be no more than 10,000 words and respect the following 
style guidelines:
https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/about/submissions#style 
<https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/about/submissions#style>
Papers will be initially reviewed by two members of the editorial team 
and then by at least
one additional external peer reviewer. We encourage authors to propose 
external peer
reviewers for their paper.

Calendar:
• 18 August 2022: initial call for papers
• 6 September 2022: online meeting of editorial team, open to interested 
authors and
workshop contributors
• 23 December 2022: submission deadline for V1
• 24 February 2023: response to authors
• March 2023: general meeting (hybrid) in Edinburgh for V2 and special 
issue contents
• 28 April 2023: submission of special issue to First Monday
• Summer 2023: publication of special issue by First Monday

Editorial team. For any question please contact:
• James Besse (Edinburgh) (j.w.besse /at/ sms.ed.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(j.w.besse /at/ sms.ed.ac.uk)>
• Dr. Morgan Currie (Edinburgh) (morgan.currie /at/ ed.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(morgan.currie /at/ ed.ac.uk)>
• Ass. prof. Alain Sandoz (Neuchâtel) (alain.sandoz /at/ unine.ch) 
<mailto:(alain.sandoz /at/ unine.ch)>
• Ass. prof. Antti Silvast (Lyngby) (aedsi /at/ dtu.dk) <mailto:(aedsi /at/ dtu.dk)>
• Léa Stiefel (Lausanne) (lea.stiefel /at/ unil.ch) <mailto:(lea.stiefel /at/ unil.ch)>
• Prof. Robin Williams (Edinburgh) (r.williams /at/ ed.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(r.williams /at/ ed.ac.uk)>


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