Call for contributions to a book on Critical Infrastructure Studies & Digital Humanities

From: Alan Liu, Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, and James Smithies

Dear all,

We are pleased to invite proposals for contributions to the Critical Infrastructure Studies & Digital Humanities book we are editing for the Debates in the Digital Humanities Series (University of Minnesota Press). (See our full, more detailed CFP.)

Critical Infrastructure Studies & Digital Humanities aims to direct the attention of digital humanists to the wider area of infrastructure studies, and deploy perspectives gained from that wider infrastructuralism to better understand the infrastructures of DH. It will bring infrastructural approaches front and center as an area where DH is uniquely equipped to lead the humanities in thought and practice, using its own infrastructural legacy as inspiration and mirror. The aim is to understand how infrastructure underpins and influences DH, and how DH in turn can influence infrastructure design, development, and maintenance. The volume will promote understanding of critical infrastructure studies as a field of writing and practice, and open dialogues between DH and cognate infrastructural fields.

Please consider contributing a work for Critical Infrastructure Studies & Digital Humanities that might fit into one of the following three categories:

1. Critical Infrastructure Studies from the Perspective of DH: Argumentative essays (preferably in the range of 6,000 words) that explore issues and debates around historical or contemporary infrastructures, or infrastructuralism at large, but with attention to (or through the lens of) their digital platforms, technologies, data, media, and other features of interest to DH. 

2. Digital Humanities from the Perspective of Critical Infrastructure Studies: Argumentative essays (preferably in the range of 6,000 words) that explore debates, histories, and theories of the infrastructures of DH itself, and of its institutions and practices, in ways that exceed a narrow disciplinary focus or a “this is my project” mode. Essays would ideally draw DH into wider vistas that will interest humanists in general or scholars in other fields. 

3. (Re)Envisioning DH Infrastructure: Briefer textual or multimedia (e.g., digital arts, graphic novel, filmic, musical), interactive, data-modeled, documentary, creative, or other works that help envision or reenvision infrastructures and are represented by a critical statement. (Contributions for this category can include materials in digital form to be embedded or linked from the open-access, online version of the volume that will appear on the Manifold platform three months after the publication of the print book. But there must be a standalone critical statement for the print book.)

To ensure that the volume includes diverse viewpoints, the editors encourage contributions from scholars, scholar-activists, practitioners, artists, designers, engineers, and others from different racial, ethnic, and indigenous backgrounds, from the LGBTQ community, from around the world, from different disciplines and kinds of institutions, and from those at all levels and stages in their profession. (Contributions must be in English, though translations in other languages provided by authors may be included in the post-print, open-access version of the volume.) 

A distinctive feature of Critical Infrastructure Studies & Digital Humanities is that each essay or other contribution will include a brief “infrastructure manifest” that declares the principal infrastructures underlying its creation—e.g., natural resources, unceded indigenous land, and major platforms, networks, tools, and institutional or other structures providing sources, storage, processing and workflow (including writing, visualizing, communicating, and collaborating), and labor and expertise—along with any key ethical considerations.

Please see the full CFP and timeline on the Debates in the Digital Humanities Series website: https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/page/cfp-critical-infrastructure-studies-digital-humanities 

We invite proposals by December 15, 2021. Please submit 500-word abstracts and a short bio to ayliu@english.ucsb.edu, urszula.pawlicka-deger@kcl.ac.uk, and james.smithies@kcl.ac.uk. (Please address all three editors.)

If you have questions, please contact us at the email addresses above. 

Kind regards,

Alan Liu, Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, and James Smithies