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- Convenors:
-
Nicolas Zehner
(TU Berlin)
Sezgin Sönmez (TU Berlin)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
This Open Panel seeks to foster dialogue between researchers in STS and the sociology of space on contemporary developments and spatial conflicts surrounding geospatial information infrastructures.
Description
There is widespread consensus among STS scholars that the rise of digital technologies within a neoliberal political context has contributed to the fragmentation of existing – often public – infrastructures and resulted in the concentration of immense power in the hands of a few dominant actors. Examples such as Starlink or Google Maps demonstrate that companies like Google, SpaceX, Amazon, and a handful of other corporate giants have learned to harness the power of platforms in order to establish themselves as essential geospatial infrastructures of the 21st century (Plantin et al. 2018; Steets and Tuma 2025). This panel aims to bring existing debates on the politics of infrastructuring in STS into conversation with recent work in the sociology of space (Löw and Knoblauch 2020; 2024). Zooming in on the ongoing work of ordering social practices and agencies, we seek to move beyond questions of “centralisation” and “fragmentation” by focusing on the different ways in which actors struggle over the spatial arrangement of material and digitized infrastructures, defend or challenge existing arrangements, and establish new ones. Doing so, we examine how the materiality of geodata, digital cartography and satellite internet shape global spaces and spatial conflicts ranging from outer space to everyday urban navigation.
We invite theoretical and empirical contributions that address the following research questions:
- How can the analytical vocabulary of the sociology of space enrich existing debates on the politics of infrastructuring in STS?
- What logics and practices of spatialization can be identified in the context of the consolidated influence of digital platforms and infrastructures?
- To what extent do imaginaries and discourses about digital infrastructures shape contemporary spatial and/or geopolitical conflicts?
- What norms and values of the “good” society are inscribed in the digital representations of those spaces?