Next week, we’re holding an international workshop on Platforms as Epistemic Infrastructures. The workshop will take place in a hybrid form across the respective media studies departments of Utrecht University and the University of Amsterdam, and it’s part of a collaboration with two universities in Brazil. I’m particularly excited about it because of the strong links with my own new project on the power of platforms over knowledge about climate change, which I’ll also have a chance to discuss as part of the program. Here’s some more info, more of which can be read via the link above:
Over the course of two afternoons, these workshops will discuss the ongoing impact of platformization on practices, materialities, and normativities of knowledge. We will explore how the production, circulation, use, and cultural status of knowledge are evolving in response to the reconfiguration of data-oriented epistemic infrastructures. Most prominently, social media platforms re-arrange computational resources and user engagement, data and interfaces, social organizations, and machine learning. This results in new modes and regimes of knowledge production across different social and cultural sectors. Starting from the assumption that epistemic infrastructures always emerge from the interplay between materialities and communities of practice, we aim to compare a diverse array of knowledge practices and their transformations: from journalism and science, to influencers and fans, from climate crisis to popular culture.
While all of them undergo similar transformation, the resulting knowledge practices are heterogeneous: they each arrange images and data, organizational, and technical resources, authority and accountability in unique ways; and they all create particular forms of authorizing, debating and (de-)legitimizing expertise and other knowledge hierarchies. Often, epistemic communities have paradoxical relationships with platformization: on the one hand, innovative knowledge emerges through their affordances; on the other hand, the growing dependence on Big Techs triggers resistance and the quest for alternative infrastructures. Next to conceptual and empirical questions, the workshops will also raise methodological issues: What is the role of digital methods, of computer vision models and data visualization, of (online) ethnography, of textual and discourse analysis for a critical analysis of the epistemic infrastructures’ sociotechnical and cross-platform dynamics?
The workshops results from a cooperation of Utrecht University (Donya Alinejad and Judith Keilbach) and the University of Amsterdam (Markus Stauff) with a research project co-organized by three Brazilian universities – Federal University of Minas Gerais/UFMG (Carlos d’Andréa), Universidade do Estado da Bahia/UNEB (Elias Bitencourt), Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais/Puc Minas (Verônica Soares da Costa) – and funded by the Brazilian research fund MCTI/CNPq.
Donya Alinejad 