[SIGCIS-Members] Call for Ideas!

Tue Aug 23 15:22:52 PDT 2016

Hi Tom:

In the research communities I inhabit the meaning that would be attached to “critical infrastructure studies” is “studies of critical infrastructure”  not “critical studies of infrastructure”. 

Further, “critical infrastructure” typically concerns "critical national infrastructure”, such as the electricity grid - see http://www.cpni.gov.uk/about/cni/ or on your side of the Atlantic - https://www.dhs.gov/what-critical-infrastructure

As regards the word “infrastructure”, here is a summary explanation that I and my computer science colleagues have used:

•Infrastructure is by definition reusable by different individuals/organizations for different purposes on different occasions.
•Not all of these uses are known to, or even the concern of, the designer(s) of the infrastructure who must create something which will respond to and support uses that have not yet been conceived.
•Infrastructures need to be capacity engineered - so that the amount of resource can be changed to meet current and expected demand.
•Over-deployment endangers the supplier,  under-deployment frustrates the user.
•One organization’s system often becomes another organization’s infrastructure.

Cheers

Brian

> On 23 Aug 2016, at 22:42, Thomas Haigh <thomas.haigh at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I don’t think critical adds a whole lot to “infrastructure studies.” It has some usefulness in formulations like “critical management studies” (a thing in Northern Europe but no so much in the US) as management scholarship is usually uncritical in every sense of the word. So “critical” demarcates a scholarly community deliberately taking a unorthodox approaches to challenge the assumptions of the field. http://www.criticalmanagement.org/content/about-cms
>  
> But science studies, STS, media studies, etc. manage to embrace a variety of socially and culturally informed perspectives without their practitioners needing to add the “critical” in front of them. Adding “critical” might be seen as a challenge to those currently embracing “infrastructure studies” as a scholarly identity. There’s also the question of whether “critical” means critical as in “critical thinking” or as in “critical theory,” and while critical theory certainly has a place among other approaches in the study of infrastructure not everyone would feel comfortable with the suggestion that it should be elevated over approaches grounded in STS, history, sociology, anthropology, etc.
>  
> Best wishes,
>  
> Tom
>  
>  
>  
> From: Members [mailto:members-bounces at lists.sigcis.org] On Behalf Of Lori Emerson
> Sent: Tuesday, August 23, 2016 1:39 PM
> To: Paul N. Edwards <pne at umich.edu>
> Cc: Dag Spicer <dspicer at computerhistory.org>; members at lists.sigcis.org
> Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Call for Ideas!
>  
> Dear all, I just wanted to thank you for sending in these great resources for infrastructure studies - I came across the term "critical infrastructure studies" a couple months ago and got quite excited about how it seemed more expansive and more useful for describing my projects on labs and the pre-history of the internet than either "media archaeology" or just "media studies." But now I wonder what the extra "critical" denotes since there's a somewhat well established field already of I.S.? Any thoughts?
>  
> yours, Lori
>  
> On Tue, Aug 23, 2016 at 11:43 AM, Paul N. Edwards <pne at umich.edu> wrote:
>> Dag, here’s a partial list. I’ll be curious to hear what others might add.
>>  
>> Bowker & Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences
>>  
>> Simon & Marvin, Splintering Urbanism — kind of a giant lit review, mostly focused on urban physical infrastructure but with some attention to digital
>>  
>> Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming
>>  
>> Edwards et al., Understanding Infrastructure: Dynamics, Tensions, and Design (NSF report with some lit review)
>>  
>> Starosielski, The Undersea Network
>>  
>> Check the books in my Infrastructures book series, co-edited with Geof Bowker - e.g. Larry Busch, Standards: Recipes for Reality
>>  
>> Also this very recent paper on platforms vs. infrastructures - not sure it counts as “canonical”!
>>  
>> Best,
>>  
>> Paul
>>  
>>  
>>  
>>  
>>> On Aug 22, 2016, at 16:20 , Dag Spicer <dspicer at computerhistory.org> wrote:
>>>  
>>> Can anyone suggest some canonical and effective texts in Infrastructure Studies?
>>> 
>>> Thanks!
>>> 
>>> Dag
>>> --
>>> Dag Spicer
>>> Senior Curator
>>> Computer History Museum
>>> Editorial Board, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
>>> 1401 North Shoreline Boulevard
>>> Mountain View, CA 94043-1311
>>> 
>>> Tel: +1 650 810 1035
>>> Fax: +1 650 810 1055
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
>>  
>> 
>> —————————————————
>> Paul N. Edwards, Professor of Information and History
>> Distinguished Faculty in Sustainability, Graham Sustainability Institute
>> Senior Fellow, Michigan Society of Fellows
>>  
>> Terse replies are deliberate. Here's why! 
>>  
>> University of Michigan School of Information
>> 4437 North Quad
>> 105 S. State Street
>> Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285
>> Twitter: @AVastMachine
>> Web: pne.people.si.umich.edu
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>> _______________________________________________
>> This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org
> 
> 
>  
> -- 
> Lori Emerson
> Associate Professor | Director, Media Archaeology Lab
> Department of English and Intermedia Arts, Writing, and Performance 
> University of Colorado at Boulder
> Hellems 101, 226 UCB, Boulder, CO 80309-0226
> loriemerson.net | mediaarchaeologylab.com
> _______________________________________________
> This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org

—

School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU
EMAIL = Brian.Randell at ncl.ac.uk   PHONE = +44 191 208 7923
URL = http://www.ncl.ac.uk/computing/staff/profile/brian.randell