As a PhD student in Science and Technology Studies (STS) at my faculty I am very lucky to have the opportunity to get high quality training in my field, which is provided by the Netherlands Graduate Research School of Science, Technology and Modern Culture (WTMC) – see my Pages for more info on WTMC.
A couple of weeks ago we had the annual Summer School, a full week of training on one major issue that is chaired by a well-known STS scholar. This year Geoffrey Bowker was anchor teacher. Every WTMC workshop is a combination of lectures by STS scholars, plenty of activities (e.g. discussing our own writing, ‘an exemplary dissertation’, discussing core reading, playing a role game or building a value free pasta bridge), and presentations of PhD students. As preparation you have to read a selection of relevant literature.
The theme for this Summer School was Values and Infrastructures at Play, and we discussed about and played with various forms of infrastructures.
Please visit the liveblog we made of the workshop with rich and in-depth descriptions of the lectures. Take a look at the pasta bridges we made!
http://www.wtmc.net/wiki/index.php?title=Liveblog_Summer_School_2011
Here is the introductory text of the workshop:
Infrastructure is multiform and ubiquitous. We live in environments that are laced with infrastructures: roads, trains, power grids and power plants, clinical practice guidelines, sewers, mobile phone networks, wifi hotspots, or water pipes. Infrastructures materially integrate societies, while at the same time they come to symbolise nationhood and even modernity. The British empire was materialised in steam train networks and telegraph lines. The conquest of the American West similarly solidified in train tracks, telegraph roads and later electrification (Nye 1990).
In everyday use, infrastructures often pass unperceived (or unnoticed). We casually rely on the presence of electricity or running water, roads, telephone and the internet. We do not seem to want to see infrastructures: electricity wires are often hidden from view, pipes are behind walls or under floors, and highways or trains need to be kept out of sight and sound behind screens or in tunnels. Communication networks are increasingly wireless and invisible. Railways and roads are repaired at night, so we can use them without worry during the day.
The invisibility of infrastructures is easily justified based on practical concerns like the wish to reduce traffic congestion and inconvenience, but this also leaves out of sight how infrastructures produce certain integrations and exclusions. As Geoffrey Bowker has argued, one founding myth of science is that it is “carried out in an eternal present, from which all external influence has been banished” (Bowker 2005, pg 33), which requires that the affordances and exclusions that for example archives and databases provide for scientific practice are left out of accounts of such practice. As the work of Bowker and others in the field of STS points out, infrastructures such as archives are therefore both sequential as well as jussive (Derrida 1996); they tell scientists what they can and cannot say and users what they can and cannot do. Infrastructures hence become important sites for locating and challenging the values they produce.
