Relational Infrastructures Research Articles

Toward Reparative Design Pedagogies

This essay explores reparative design pedagogies to advance intersecting racial justice and climate goals through the case study of the “CoDesign Field Lab: Black Belt Study for the Green New Deal.” Through engaged community design processes with Afro-descendant communities in the Black Belt South, the design action research seminar sought to reimagine and future the region as fount and staging ground for a reparation-based Green New Deal. We examine the course design and setup—including relational infrastructures to deepen collaboration between regional youth and community elders and graduate students of urban planning, architecture, landscape architecture, and design studies—and the resulting future histories of reparative infrastructures for the Black Belt. The concluding discussion considers case implications for design pedagogies, including the importance of shifting away from knowledge bases and design-cultures predicated on whiteness and white supremacy, and supporting community-based processes of reparative design and reparations centering those who have directly suffered harm and their descendant communities.

Human preparedness: Relational infrastructures and medical countermeasures in Sierra Leone

ABSTRACT This paper examines health worker experiences in two areas of post-epidemic preparedness in Sierra Leone – vaccine trials and laboratory strengthening – to reflect on the place of people in current models of epidemic response. Drawing on ethnographic research and interviews with health workers in the aftermath of Ebola, it explores the hopes and expectations that interventions foster for frontline workers in under-resourced health systems, and describes the unseen work involved in sustaining robust response infrastructures. Our analysis focuses on what it means for the people who sustain health systems in an emergency to be ‘prepared’ for an epidemic. Human preparedness entails more than the presence of a labour force; it involves building and maintaining ‘relational infrastructures’, often fragile social and moral relationships between health workers, publics, governments, and international organisations. The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the value of rethinking human resources from an anthropological perspective, and investing in the safety and support of people at the forefront of response. In describing the labour, personal losses, and social risks undertaken by frontline workers for protocols and practicality to meet in an emergency context, we describe the social process of preparedness; that is, the contextual engineering and investment that make response systems work.

A Relational Work Perspective on the Gig Economy: Doing Creative Work on Digital Labour Platforms

Based on interviews with 49 visual artists, graphic designers and illustrators working on two leading global digital labour platforms, this article examines how creative workers perform relational work as a means of attenuating labour commodification, precarity, and algorithmic normativity. The article argues that creative work on online labour platforms, rather than being entirely controlled by depersonalised, anonymised and algorithm-driven labour market forces, is also infused in relational infrastructures whose upkeep, solidity and durability depends on the emotional efforts undertaken by workers to match economic transactions and their media of exchange to meaningful client relations. By applying a relational work perspective from economic sociology to the study of platform-mediated gig work, the article elucidates the micro-foundations of creative work in the digital gig economy, including how labour inequalities are produced and reproduced within and around micro-level interpersonal interactions.

Mapping buyer’s clubs; what role do they play in achieving equitable access to medicines?

ABSTRACT Buyer’s clubs were first recognised during the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the 1980s and focussed on knowledge curation and distribution of treatments. In the past decade, there has been a resurgence of buyer’s clubs, mostly focussed on hepatitis C treatment and PrEP. This paper aims to increase understanding of buyer’s clubs and stimulate discussion on their role in achieving equitable access to medicines. Our proposed definition of a buyer’s club is ‘a community-led organisation or group which seeks to improve an individual’s access to medication through knowledge sharing and/or distribution as its primary goal’. The logistical and relational infrastructures of buyer’s clubs have been mapped out. Networks and communities are integral to buyer’s clubs by facilitating practical aspects of buyer’s clubs and creating a sense of community that serves as a foundation of trust. For a user to receive necessary medical support, doctors play a crucial role, yet, obtaining this support is difficult. Whilst buyer’s clubs are estimated to have enabled thousands of people to access medicines, and they run the risk of perpetuating health inequities and injustices. They may have the potential to serve as a health activism tool to stimulate sustainable changes; however, this needs to be explored further.

Critical Urbanism and the Digitally Augmented City: Envisioning Urban Commons as Civic Assemblages in the Age of Networked Translocalism, Multi-Associative Transduction and Counterhegemonic Transculturalism

This essay discusses problems affecting the contemporary of the urban commons by addressing the emerging spatialization of the relational infrastructures of urban communities due to the recent transformations of the technological framework. It sheds light on three key macrophenomena that are changing the nature of these institutions, translocalism, transduction and transculturalism, and drafts design strategies to foster their agency for the affirmation of equality and pluralism while guaranteeing social inclusiveness, cohesiveness, pluralism and differentiation. It answers the research question on how designers and planners can respond to the effects of these disrupting phenomena that redefine their roles, mission and instruments. It proposes a design framework for new commons operating in the reality–virtuality continuum. We envisage them as constituted by three intertwined components: a) a set of enabling relations, which constitute relational machines that establish dynamic, robust and efficacious connections between distributed and mobile actants engaged in commoning actions; b) a concrete infrastructure, which includes the constitutive elements that come together in meta-stable and variable context-specific platforms supporting the relational machines; c) a set of constitutive agents, which includes counterhegemonic pluralistic narratives of possible futures that foster social formations to subvert the existing abstract (i.e., postpolitical, conflict-free and antidifferential) spaces. Our proposal contributes to the discourse on the spatialization of radical democracy ideas, foregrounding the role of design in liberating the creative collective power of co-create dialogical utopian realms. These narratives through fabulation, allegory and parody devise possible translocal, transductive and transcultural spatialites for commoning and differentiation to foster the collective appropriation of the new ordinary.

Feminist design and the relational infrastructures of protest

Feminist design and the relational infrastructures of protest

DIGITAL LABOR SOLIDARITIES, COLLECTIVE FORMATIONS, AND RELATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURES

Research on digital worker experiences have shed light on the problematic realities of digital labor, which include increasing levels of stress and anxiety over financial and career instability, physical exhaustion, and isolation - all of which underscore the precarity that belie the optimistic facade of labor under the new economy. Given the multiple constraints underlying collective formation among digital workers, this panel explores the characteristics and dynamics of emerging forms of collective organisation among digital workers by reflecting on experiences from China, the Philippines, Brazil, and India. Examining experiences of digital labor organisation and challenges to build solidarity across national and even regional experience, the panel hopes to enrich the discussion in terms of the politics, cultural nuances, and local meanings useful for examining digital worker expressions of resistance and solidarity amidst continuing technological development and platform reforms. This close examination of diverse forms of collective organisation, as well as the relational infrastructures underlying them, aims demonstrate how workers challenge the dominant claims of global capitalism while steep in recognition of the opportunities that these offer.

Embarked on social processes (the rivers) in dynamic and multilevel networks (the boats)

Abstract This paper is the written text underlying the keynote presentation at the Sunbelt XXXVIII in Utrecht, 2018. It presents a neo-structural approach to social processes in the organizational society and the usefulness of the analyses of multilevel networks to understand how we navigate these processes and are made aware of them when we face cooperation dilemmas. Empirical illustrations look at how multilevel networks and relational infrastructures are useful to research a process such as coopetitive learning in science, business and government. A conclusion focuses on the role of multilevel relational infrastructures in institutional entrepreneurship, social change and politics, as well as on our responsibility to develop our knowledge of these social processes and multilevel relational infrastructures as open science.

Simulation, Control and Desire. Urban Commons and Semi-Public Space Resilience in the Age of Augmented Transductive Territorial Production

Considering place-based participation a crucial factor for the development of sustainable and resilient cities in the post-digital turn age, this paper addresses the socio-spatial implications of the recent transformation of relationality networks. To understand the drivers of spatial claims emerged in conditions of digitally augmented spectacle and simulation, it focuses on changes occurring in key nodes of central urban public and semi-public spaces of rapidly developing cities. Firstly, it proposes a theoretical framework for the analysis of problems related to socio-spatial fragmentation, polarisation and segregation of urban commons subject to external control. Secondly, it discusses opportunities and criticalities emerging from a representational paradox depending on the ambivalence in the play of desire found in digitally augmented semi-public spaces. The discussion is structured to shed light on specific socio-spatial relational practices that counteract the dissipation of the “common worlds” caused by sustained processes of urban gentrification and homogenisation. The theoretical framework is developed from a comparative critical urbanism approach inspired by the right to the city and the right to difference, and elaborates on the discourse on sustainable development that informs the United Nations’ New Urban Agenda. The analysis focuses on how digitally augmented geographies reintroduce practices of participation and commoning that reassemble fragmented relational infrastructures and recombine translocal social, cultural and material elements. Empirical studies on the production of advanced simulative and transductive spatialities in places of enhanced consumption found in Auckland, New Zealand, ground the discussion. These provide evidence of the extent to which the agency of the augmented territorialisation forces reconstitutes inclusive and participatory systems of relationality. The concluding notes, speculating on the emancipatory potential found in these social laboratories, are a call for a radical redefinition of the approach to the problem of the urban commons. Such a change would improve the capacity of urbanism disciplines to adequately engage with the digital turn and efficaciously contribute to a maximally different spatial production that enhances and strengthens democracy and pluralism in the public sphere.

The infrastructure of telecare: implications for nursing tasks and the nurse-doctor relationship.

Telecare can offer a unique experience of trust in patient-nurse relationships, embracing new standards for professional discretion among nurses, but also reflects an increasingly complicated relationship between nurses and doctors. The study uses ethnographic methodology in relation to a large 5 million euro project at four hospitals caring for 120 patients with COPD. Twenty screen-mediated conferences were observed and two workshops, centring on nurses' photo elucidation of the practice of telecare, were conducted with a focus on shifting tasks, professional discretion, responsibility and boundaries between nurses and doctors. Analytically, the study draws on Star's notion of 'infrastructure' and Mol, Moser and Pols's ideas of care as 'tinkering'. Infrastructure is understood as human and non-human conduct that is embedded into wider organisational conventions, sites and structures. The analysis demonstrates and proposes that, in telecare, greater accountability, discretion and responsibility are imposed on the nurse, but that they also have less access to the means of clinical decision-making, namely, doctors. The article explores how relational infrastructures ascribe the professions they constitute (nurses and doctors) functions of power and accountability and highlights the ethical problem of the nurse being given greater responsibility while simultaneously becoming more dependent on the doctor.

Networks and Institutionalization: A Neo-structural Approach

Abstract This paper is the text prepared for the keynote address of the EUSN 2017 conference in Mainz, Germany. A short presentation of concepts reflects in part the foundations of neo-structural sociology (NSS) and its use of social and organisational network analyses, combined with other methodologies, to better understand the roles of structure and culture in individual and collective agency. The presentation shows how NSS accounts for institutional change by focusing on the importance of combined relational infrastructures and rhetorics. Specific characteristics of institutional entrepreneurs who punch above their weight in institutionalization processes are introduced for that purpose, particularly the importance of multi-status oligarchs, status heterogeneity, high-status inconsistencies, collegial oligarchies, conflicts of interests and rhetorics of relative/false sacrifice. Two empirical examples illustrate this approach. The first case focuses on a network study of the Commercial Court of Paris, a 450-year-old judicial institution. The second case focuses on a network study of a field-configuring event (the so-called Venice Forum) lobbying for the emergence of a new European jurisdiction, the Unified Patent Court, and its attempt to create a common intellectual property regime for the continent. For sociologists, both examples involve “studying up”: they are cases of public/private joint regulation of markets bringing together these ingredients of institutionalization. The conclusion suggests future lines of research that NSS opens for the study of institutionalization, in particular using the dynamics of multi-level networks. One of the main issues raised by this approach is its contribution to the study of democratic deficits in a period of intense institutional change in Europe.

Collegial oligarchy and networks of normative alignments in transnational institution building

This paper presents a combined relational and cultural approach to transnational institution building by focusing on a network analysis of a small collegial oligarchy and normative alignments among its peers. To contribute to a theory of institutionalization, we propose hypotheses about whom professionals as institutional entrepreneurs are likely to select as members of their collegial oligarchy, about the role of social networks among them in identifying these leaders, and about the costs of alignments on these leaders’ normative choices. We test these hypotheses using mainly Exponential Random Graph Models (ERGMs) applied to a dataset including network information and normative choices collected at the so-called Venice Forum – a field-configuring event that was central in creating and mobilizing a network of European patent judges for the construction of a new transnational institution, the European Unified Patent Court. We track normative alignments on the collegial hierarchy in this network of judges and their divergent interpretations of the contemporary European patent. Highlighting this under-examined articulation of relational infrastructures and cultural framing in transnational institutionalization shows how Northern European forms of capitalism tend to dominate in this institutionalization process at the expense of the Southern European forms. It also helps reflect on the usefulness of analyses of small networks of powerful players in organizational societies, where power and influence are highly concentrated.

A Cultural Anthropology of Head Porterage: Fresh Insights into Unique Markets

In this article, we examined the repertoire of existences, processes and practises as well as mechanisms of open market place trading that is a definitive character of trading and associated dealings in many Sub-Saharan Africa countries which is as a result of the nature and structure of social and economic organizations cum cultural relational infrastructures of these Sub-Saharan societies. One stop shops and shopping malls that commonly punctuate American and European societies are rare necessitating special, unique and innovative ways of transporting goods and services across locations. It is within this socio-cultural, relational and economic infrastructural milieu that head porterage (Alabaru) subsists. Unfortunately, not many works exist in the areas of Anthropology and Cultural Studies on head porterage (Alabaru) which has assumed important character in the existences of most Sub-Saharan African markets with implications for global markets and world distribution/supply chains. This article therefore deployed robust Anthropological and qualitative methodology to examine the critical contours of the problematic. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/hjsa.v6i0.10716 Himalayan Journal of Sociology and Anthropology Vol.6 2014: 166-186

Invisible Social Infrastructures to Facilitate Time-pressed Distributed Organizing

How do complex societal demands and time constraints posed by distributed temporary organizing affect organizational communication? Extending Bowker and Star’s (2002) work on infrastructures, we introduce two context-specific ‘invisible’, social infrastructures: organizational and relational. We empirically assess their role in an international, multi-site ERP-software implementation. We investigated how these infrastructures shaped organizational activities, aligned discourses, created order, and prevented divergent behaviours. We found that mutually interdependent organizational and relational infrastructures strengthened social relationships and saved time by facilitating non-routine collaboration and organizational communication under geographic and temporal constraints. We argue that the conceptualization of (infra)structural and process dynamics will help researchers and practitioners understand and handle organizational communication in distributed temporary organizations.