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@lists.sigcis.org] On Behalf Of Lori Emerson
Sent: Tuesday, August 23, 2016 1:39 PM
To: Paul N. Edwards <pne@umich.edu>
Cc: Dag Spicer <dspicer@computerhistory.org>; members@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@umich.edu> wrote: