Day Eight: Ethnographies of Infrastructure

SDS 237: Data Ethnography

Lindsay Poirier

Make a long list of everything (both material and non-material) that enabled you to arrive in class today. What had to exist for this to be possible?

Turn to your neighbor and discuss:

Pick one supporting infrastructure:

  • How often do you think about this infrastructure?
  • Is it always an enabling infrastructure? When might it not be?

Reading Discussion

Relationality of Infrastructure

infrastructue is a fundamentally relational concept, becoming real infrastructure in relation to organized practice.

  • Often we think of infrastructure as “just there”
  • Assumes that infrastructure is the same thing for all people all of the time
  • Viewing infrastructure as “relational” acknowledges that certain things become infrastructure to different people in different moments
  • Not so much “what is infrastructure” but “when is infrastructure”

Star’s Definition of Infrastructure

  • Embeddedness: Sunk into other socio-technical structures
  • Transparency: Does not need to continuously be reassembled
  • Reach or Scope: Connects more than one site
  • Learned as part of membership: Use naturalized through communities of practice
  • Embodiment of standards: Component parts can connect through standardized conventions
  • Built on an installed base: Wrestles with the logics of its underlying infrastructures
  • Visible upon breakdown: Often taken for granted until breaking

Master Narratives

  • Singular voice designed into infrastructures that do not attend to diversity
  • Assumed to speak for everyone
  • Identifying involves asking: what has been made other by the design of this infrastructure?

Invisible Work

  • Work that fades into the background when presenting an infrastructure
  • Sometimes invisible because that work is “tacit” or rote
  • Sometimes structurally hidden from view
  • Identifying involves asking: what forms of labor tend to go unrecognized when looking at this infrastructure

“Women made up 47% of the U.S. civilian labor force in 2023, up from 30% in 1950…”