Call for papers: Encountering Infrastructure Conference

This panel examines how disciplinary knowledge - cultural reasoning, contextual judgment, domain interpretation - becomes an infrastructural layer within both computational and physical systems. How are they embedded into design decisions, operational protocols, interfaces, and standards? How do they make or break the ways cyber-physical systems take residence in the world outside of their lab testing sandboxes?

Extending Star’s insights on infrastructure to knowledge-intensive systems, we are calling for various explorations of expertise-as-infrastructure. Is it distinct from purely material or technical substrates? Is it integrative of them, and how? Under what conditions does it become salient? What do notions and practices of care, maintenance, imagination, and improvisation play in the ways cyber-physical systems take form and a life on their own?

We invite contributions that examine how disciplinary knowledge becomes infrastructural across AI, robotics, and hybrid systems; characteristic modes of failure when interpretive infrastructure is absent or degraded; the labor involved in maintaining expertise within long-lived systems; and historical cases where disciplinary knowledge became substrate.

Check out the full panel description and send in your abstract here by March 30th here.