Securitizing the infrastructural Europe, infrastructuring a securitized Europe

This book explores the processes and practices of the securitization and de-securitization of European infrastructures and how political institutions interact with security and insecurity. Expert contributors address distinct areas, from border politics and biosecurity to health governance and law and border control enforcement, to examine the various ways in which infrastructures are envisioned, designed, negotiated and built. They explore how ‘infrastructuring’ contributes to emergent forms of European identity, integration, and statehood. The book will appeal to scholars and students of Science and Technology Studies, Political Sociology, Critical Security Studies, International Relations, European Integration Studies, Infrastructure Studies, or Critical Border and Migration Studies

"No Disease for the Others": How COVID-19 data can enact new and old alterities

The COVID-19 pandemic invites a question about how long-standing narratives of alterity and current narratives of disease are entwined and re-enacted in the diagnosis of COVID-19. In this commentary, we discuss two related phenomena that, we argue, should be taken into account in answering this question. First, we address the diffusion of pseudoscientific accounts of minorities' immunity to COVID-19. While apparently praising minorities' biological resistance, such accounts rhetorically introduce a distinction between "Us" and "Them," and in so doing produce new and re-enact old narratives of alterity. Second, these unsubstantiated narratives thrive on fake news and scarcity of data. The second part of this commentary thus surveys the methods through which the COVID-19 test is administered in various countries. We argue that techniques used for data collection have a major role in producing COVID-19 data that render contagion rates among migrants and other minorities invisible. In the conclusion, we provide two recommendations about how COVID-19 data can instead potentially work towards inclusion

Tracing back Communities. An Analysis of Ars Electronica's Digital Communities archive from an ANT perspective

Since long before the popularization of the Web, community-making has been a significant driving force for the development of the Internet. As a consequence, in mid 1990s online communities became a key object of study at the intersection of social sciences, organizational studies and computer sciences. Today, about fifteen years after these early studies, the concept \u2018online community\u2019 seems to be at stake. As a matter of fact, while communitarian ties enabled by digital media are more and more invocated, in late 2000s the Internet is revealing itself as a much more bureaucratic and profit-oriented domain than ever, to the point that it is not clear whether there exist online ties that are specific enough to be called \u2018communitarian\u2019. In order to analyse such an opaque and unstable object of study as current techno-social assemblages, innovative methods specifically developed to study fuzzy objects have to be devised and some epistemological questions have to be addressed. This research starts indeed from the impasse that the digital communitarian culture is experiencing at the end of the 2000s and borrows some epistemological insights from the Actor-Network Theory. By analyzing the entry forms submitted to the world\u2019s leading competition for digital communities, Prix Ars Electronica, this research thus calls into question some \u2018black-boxed\u2019 concepts like \u2018cyberculture\u2019, \u2018digital revolution\u2019, \u2018empowerment\u2019 and \u2018online community\u2019 itself. On one hand, the results bring into question both leading sociological positions and hype-generated commonplaces. On the other hand, the results offer evidence to those arguments according to which current ICT developments represent the beginning of a new phase of technological enclosure

From Community to Text and Back. On Semiotics and Ant as Text-Based Methods for Fleeting Objects of Study

This article illustrates a case study where the adoption of epistemological assumptions and data analysis techniques borrowed from both semiotics and ANT have enabled the researcher to transcend the limits that characterise traditional studies on online communities underpinned by a “sociology of the social” approach. Today, the very concept of “online community” seems to be at stake, to the point that it is no longer clear whether there exist online ties that are specific enough to be called “communitarian”. In order to analyse such an opaque and unstable object of study, innovative methods specifically developed to study fuzzy objects have to be devised and some epistemological questions have to be addressed. Approaches like semiotics and ANT turn out to be useful exactly because they use texts as “handles” to grasp heterogeneous, transient, objects of study. This article discusses in details a “funnel-like” method of analysis in a research field that has too often forgone the critique of epistemological assumptions inherited from other disciplines

Openness as an asset: A classification system for online communities based on actor-network theory

There exists a lack of consensus among scholars about the definition and categorization of technology-mediated communities. If these divergences hamper the possibility to devise a unique definition of online communities, some principia divisionis can nonetheless be found, in order to handle heterogeneity. Drawing upon case studies selected from Ars Electronica's Digital Communities competition, this paper analyses the limits of the categorization variables traditionally used to classify online communities, and proposes a new classification system made of two variables measuring the "openness" of the community. The first variable enacts Actor-Network Theory's distinction between mediators and intermediaries, while the second considers the degree of openness of the regimes of access and visibility enabled by groupware architectures. On-field evaluation of this classification system shows three advantages: since it is based on the abstract criterion "openness", it does not arbitrarily reduce the richness of the techno-social world, but rather allows researchers to cluster few types of online community. In addition, it is of some merit in tracking innovation in techno-social assemblages. \ua9 2010 ACM

Towards a sociomaterial approach to inter-organizational boundaries: How information systems elicit relevant knowledge in government outsourcing

This article furthers a sociomaterial framework to examine inter-organizational boundaries in government IT projects. It engages in a dialogue with the practice theory-based approach to boundary spanning and utilizes analytical tools and epistemologies drawn from the social studies of technology. It aims to contribute to a situated, material understanding of inter-organizational boundaries. We argue that boundaries in outsourcing relationships can be de facto enacted through definitions of what counts as relevant knowledge. Information systems have a key role in eliciting such definitions, thus establishing knowledge asymmetries and regimes of inclusion and exclusion. The article responds to the call to value the role of artefacts in IT research. Furthermore, it eventually shows that understanding knowledge asymmetries triggered at the micro-level of information systems can help to examine macro-scale transformations between the public and the private sectors. To illustrate the framework, two ethnographic case studies of governmental IT projects are discussed. The first case concerns a permit and licence submission service in Italy. The second case analyses a 20-year-long database integration carried on at the Dutch land registry. In the first case, information systems made relevant a form of knowledge developed by contractors; in the second case, the integration process valued knowledge developed in-house. Three sets of implications are drawn for the theory and practice of inter-organizational IT projects. To conclude, the article focuses on inter-organizational boundaries involving the public and the private sectors and foresees a novel interdisciplinary research direction at the confluence of information systems and political studies

Blame is in the Eye of the Beholder: Beyond an ethics of hubris and shame in the time of COVID-19

As misinformation and disinformation spread more rapidly and widely than ever before, individuals have been encouraged to be critical consumers of all received information. At the heart of this point of contention is the question of where responsibility and fault should lie. This framing and dynamic have taken a new form during the COVID-19 pandemic: a risk that the narrative of victim blaming may overcome narratives of care and responsibility, at all levels and across national contexts. This begs the question of which ethical assumptions individuals and institutions will build upon in navigating the crisis and developing policies and best practices for everyday life, as well as for what will come next

Communities at a Crossroads. Material semiotics for online sociability in the fade of cyberculture

How to conceptualize online sociability in the 21st century? To answer this question, Communities at a Crossroads looks back at the mid-2000s. With the burst of the creative-entrepreneur alliance, the territorialization of the internet and the commercialization of interpersonal ties, that period constituted a turning point for digital communitarian cultures. Many of the techno-libertarian culture\u2019s utopias underpinning the ideas for online sociability faced systematic counter evidence. This change in paradigm has still consequences today. Avoiding both empty invocations of community and swift conclusions of doom, Annalisa Pelizza investigates the theories of actions that have underpinned the development of techno-social digital assemblages after the \u2018golden age\u2019 of online communities. Communities at a Crossroads draws upon the analysis of Ars Electronica\u2019s Digital Communities archive, which is the largest of its kind worldwide, and in doing so presents a multi-faceted picture of internet sociability between the two centuries. Privileging an anti-essentialist, performative approach over sociological understandings of online communities, Communities at a Crossroads proposes a radical epistemological turn. It argues that in order to conceptualize contemporary online sociability, we need first to abandon the techno-libertarian communalist rhetoric. Then, it is necessary to move beyond the foundational distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, and adopt a material semiotic approach. In the end, we might have to relinquish the effort to define online or digital communities and engage in more meaningful mapping exercises

The Ambivalence of Platforms: Between Surveillance and Resistance in the Management of Vulnerable Populations

This contribution aims to summarize and highlight the main themes emerged during the panel “Surveillance infrastructures or open platforms? Aid and control of vulnerable populations through digital data” that took place at the 8th STS Italia Conference. The panel invited to re-flect upon the ambivalence and ambiguity of digital platforms and data infra-structures for population management as well as on the highly diversified functions and users they support and attract. More precisely, presenters were encouraged to enquire how platforms and data infrastructures affect vulnerable populations and reconfigure the boundaries between the private and public domains: how do they allow empowering and innovative communication and resistance strategies? How, on the contrary, do they produce novel or exacerbate already existing vulnerabilities? How is the modern distinction between government, business, and civil society de facto reshuffled as a consequence? Although panel’s presentations discussed remarkably different types of platforms – from online maps and social net-works to public health databases and migration technologies – they overall emphasized that only a careful, situated analysis of the multiple socio-technical factors shaping users’ engagement might help to understand how – and why – those technologies become tools for control and surveillance or empowerment resources

Birth of a Failure: Consequences of Framing ICT Projects for the Centralization of Inter-Departmental Relations

Government information system failures are filling not only newspapers but also parliamentary and administrative reports. This article deals with a case in which information and communication technologies (ICT)–related failure claimed by the media influenced the parliamentary agenda, and intra-governmental relations. Drawing on a narrative analysis of a Dutch parliamentary commission’s hearings, it argues that the way the issue was initially framed by the media and then adopted, un-problematized, by Parliament steered the direction of action toward specific administrative solutions, thus shaping the landscape of possible organizational alliances. The article recommends a proactive role of parliaments in framing ICT projects