Infrastructuring Publics: A Research Perspective

Korn, Matthias; Reißmann, Wolfgang; Röhl, Tobias; Sittler, David

doi:10.1007/978-3-658-20725-0_2

Cited by 10 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 82 publications

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“…While the concepts of enregisterment and metapragmatic ideology thus help us to point out the different frames of reference and normative contexts that are mobilized in making the practice of blocking explicit, it does not, however, capture the medial specificity of block talk. We therefore propose accompanying the aforementioned perspective on processes of enregisterment with a conception of 'communicative infrastructuring', adding to recent debates in media studies about 'infrastructures of making public' (see Korn et al, 2019). By communicative infrastructures we aim to encompass, on the one hand, the implicit speech routines and material affordances that undergird block talk and which generate publics around the act of blocking.…”

Section: Discussion: Enregisterment Of Blocking and Infrastructuring ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Block talk’ on Twitter: Material affordances and communicative norms

Krämer,

Otto

2023

Media, Culture & Society

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This article explores the phenomenon of block talk among Germanspeaking Twitter users, based on a subsample of 1700 tweets from a larger corpus of 380,000 block-related tweets collected between February and December 2021. Block talk refers to users publicly mentioning and conversing about the disconnective practice of blocking, which sometimes stimulates a debate about the legitimate use of blocking while at other times providing an outgroup marker for collective positioning. Through the example of block talk we demonstrate that the platform’s curatorial infrastructure for drawing boundaries between public and private is continuously negotiated, and that this negotiation transforms the meaning of some of the default communicative affordances of the platform but also creates its own routines of making public. On the one hand, we show how users adapt conversational devices such as hashtags, screenshots, and @-mentions in the context of block talk. On the other hand, we present examples of Twitter users’ normative reflections about blocking and discuss them as processes of metapragmatic enregisterment. In the final discussion, we propose to integrate processes of routinized adaptation as well as reflexive enregisterment into a joint process of ‘communicative infrastructuring’.

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Section: Discussion: Enregisterment Of Blocking and Infrastructuring ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Block talk’ on Twitter: Material affordances and communicative norms

Krämer,

Otto

2023

Media, Culture & Society

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“…Rivano Eckerdal (2018) coined the term ‘librarising’ versus ‘library’, to highlight that these civic institutions are ‘constantly becoming’ organisations, where staff, visitors and artefacts continuously intertwine, readjust and rearrange in response to systemic challenges like austerity, illiteracy and social and cultural exclusion. As opposed to the nouns library and infrastructure, the verbs librarising (Rivano Eckerdal, 2018) and infrastructuring (Korn et al, 2019) substantiate that social infrastructures such as the library are constantly in flux, open-ended, changing and contested. As Power et al (2022: 12, emphasis added) state: ‘Infrastructures require maintenance in order that they obdure (.…”

Section: Social Infrastructure and Community Librarianshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Below, we first theoretically outline the library as social infrastructure. Following Rivano Eckerdal’s (2018) notion of ‘librarising’, we not only focus on the library as a noun, space or infrastructure, but also as a verb, a practice or ‘infrastructuring’ (Korn et al, 2019). In other words: we regard the library as much a place of books, computers and other materialities, as an outcome of multiple behaviours, routines and emotions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Routinised practices of community librarians: Daily struggles of Dutch public libraries to be(come) social infrastructures

Melik

Hazeleger

2023

Journal of Librarianship and Information Science

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Next to their traditional role as places for information provision and knowledge transmission, public libraries increasingly also function as important social infrastructures contributing to the everyday life in cities. As such, they can help to address systemic challenges such as social fragmentation, loneliness, exclusion and precarity. However, the library not merely is a social infrastructure, but becomes one each operating day through continuous labour by a network of stakeholders. This paper specifically examines library staff and their routinised practices to provide, perform and maintain the library as social infrastructure. The empirical research was carried out in four public libraries in the Netherlands and focussed on staff members who were in a 1-year post-graduate programme to become a community librarian, and their close colleagues. It consisted of two phases: first librarians were shadowed at work, followed by a focus group interview on the multiple problems librarians encounter to (re)make their library into social infrastructures. These include coping with limited space, collaborating with other institutions, difficulties to reach out to the community, financial struggles and differentiating interpretations of the library’s primary function.

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“…A common trait of laws and infrastructures is that each can create, shape, or prevent the emergence of social relations of particular kinds. Following classic work in legal and political theory, and recent work in infrastructure studies, we explore the development of such relations through the conceptual, normative, and empirical lens provided by the notion of publics (Collier et al 2016, Korn et al 2019b, Le Dantec 2016, Marres 2012.…”

Section: Infrastructural Legal and Normative Publicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Neoliberal ideologies and the shift to private provision in some societies and technological sectors brought analytic focus on what had always been the practical reality of the simultaneous existence of multiple infrastructural publics, emerging from different social interactions and relations with different infrastructures (for reviews, see Collier et al 2016, Korn et al 2019b, Latour & Weibel 2005, Marres & Lezaun 2011. Praxeological social science studies showed that assorted "practices of infrastructuring and making public have engendered heterogeneous publics," with variation in "scaling and trajectory, degrees of participation, representation or institutional/organisational delegation, localisation and distribution of people, objects and issues, and the infrastructural and public media involved" (Korn et al 2019b, pp.…”

Section: Infrastructural Publicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Infrastructures and Laws: Publics and Publicness

Kingsbury

Maisley

2021

Annu. Rev. Law. Soc. Sci.

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Infrastructures are technical-social assemblages infused in politics and power relations. They spur public action, prompting increased scholarly reference to the practices of infrastructural publics. This article explores the normative and conceptual meanings of infrastructures, publics, and infrastructural publics. It distills from political theory traditions of Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, and Nancy Fraser a normative ideal of publics composed of the persons subject to a particular configuration of power relations that may significantly affect their autonomy. Autonomy can be seriously affected not only by existing or planned infrastructures, with their existing or anticipating users and workers and objectors, but also by the lack of an infrastructure or by the terms of infrastructural exclusions, rationings, channelings, and fiscal impositions. Legal-institutional mechanisms provide some of the means for infrastructural publics to act and be heard, and for conflicts between or within different publics to be addressed, operationalizing legal ideas of publicness. These mechanisms are often underprovided or misaligned with infrastructure. One reason is the murkiness and insecurity of relations of infrastructural publics to legal publics constituted or framed as such by institutions and instruments of law and governance. We argue that thoughtful integration of infrastructural and legal scaling and design, accompanied by a normative aspiration to publicness, may have beneficial effects. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Volume 17 is October 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

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Infrastructuring Publics: A Research Perspective

Cited by 10 publications

References 82 publications

‘Block talk’ on Twitter: Material affordances and communicative norms

‘Block talk’ on Twitter: Material affordances and communicative norms

Routinised practices of community librarians: Daily struggles of Dutch public libraries to be(come) social infrastructures

Infrastructures and Laws: Publics and Publicness

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