I recently heard the wonderful news that I will be part of an international research team working on the new project, Platforms as epistemic infrastructures: investigating ways of engaging, resisting, and knowing. The project will be coordinated by Carlos Frederico de Brito D Andrea (Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil) and also involves collaborators at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), Utrecht University (UU), Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais (PUC Minas), and the Universidade do Estado da Bahia (UNEB). The project is funded by a Brazilian research fund granted by the Brazilian CNPq (Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation) and involves researchers in the Netherlands and Brazil. I’m excited to work with the team over the next two years! Here’s a blurb of the project’s focus.
“This project will argue that the articulation between platform materialities and communities of practice organized around them gives rise to ‘epistemic infrastructures’ with which journalists, scientists, fans, and other groups act to produce, organize, and disseminate specific kinds of knowledge.
The main objective of this project is to conduct empirical investigations on how platforms, as epistemic infrastructures, influence knowledge production in four thematic areas: science, sustainability, culture, and sports. We aim to explore how these infrastructures emerge in situations such as science communication, sustainability actions, audiovisual heritage preservation, data fandoms, and sports controversies.
Our hypothesis is that epistemic communities have paradoxical relationships with platformization: on the one hand, innovative practices and knowledge emerge through them, for example, through the use of AI systems; on the other hand, they are concerned with the growing economic and infrastructural dependence on Big Techs and the need to resist and seek alternatives.”
The image connected to this post is AI-generated with the prompt: ‘visual representation of an international academic research project based between the netherlands and brazil and focused on the theme “Platforms as epistemic infrastructures”‘
Donya Alinejad 