A methodological fault-line crossing Infrastructure Studies, and why it matters

I

Operators of large-scale infrastructure are never safe from the disciplinary and interdisciplinary assaults of economists, civil engineers, ecologists, risk managers, political scientists, anthropologists and more, who claim to know better and have a special purchase that demands all our attention.

A less banal observation is the cross-cutting fault-line once each discipline’s poses its “big picture”: Some ratchet up analysis to the global, others dig down into the granular. We’re told that further analysis necessarily entails resorting to understanding the wider contexts (political, social, cultural. . .) or to understanding the more fine-grained practices, processes and interactions.

We’re told, by way of example, that the study of digital archives is first and foremost “deeply rooted in the history of infrastructure policy”. But you have a choice in describing that policy–up or down:

In our attempt to understand contemporary archival politics, it would seem much more beneficial to pay attention to the concrete political issues in which community digital archives are involved, such as, for example, armed conflict and civil unrest (e.g. The Mosireen Collective 2024; Syrian Archive 2024; Ukraine War Archive 2024), gender queerness (e.g. Australian Queer Archives 2024; Digitial Transgender Archive 2024; Queer Digital History Project 2024), forced migration (e.g. The Amplification Project 2024; Archivio Memorie Migranti 2024; Living Refugee Archive 2024), post-colonialism (e.g. Talking Objects Lab 2024), rights of Indigenous peoples (e.g. Archivo Digital Indigena 2024; Digital Sami Archives 2024; Mukurtu 2024), racial discrimination (e.g. The Black Archives 2024; Black Digital Archiving 2024), or feminism (e.g. Féminicides (2024); Feminist Archive North 2024, Rise Up 2024).

You many wonder at the methodological finesse in this passage, namely: equating the concrete with the abstract. It’s not really-existing archival practices the author describes, but rather “the politics of digital archival practice.” Instead of the case-specific, these politics face outward and upward. They’re “political agendas”. Such is why the author can write he is “attending to the politics of digital archives at the level of concrete archival practices,” while in no way differentiating the practices, processes and interactions of each of the bolded categories in the quoted passage and how they work themselves out, case by case and over time.

II

I however come from profession, policy analysis, whose disposition is to dig down rather than ratchet up, especially when it comes Infrastructure Studies. Here, the “big picture” each discipline gives us is too important for them alone to determine how to move the analysis toward policy relevance.

In the infrastructure case of digital archives, I suspend judgment over the author’s conclusion precisely because no concrete practices of digital archiving are detailed over a range of different cases. Please note: He may well have them at hand and to be clear, I am happy to search out practices that float something in and through passages such as:

Similarly, the temporality of community-based digital archival enterprises seems neither ephemeral nor unfathomable. Rather, it plays a crucial role in rearticulating the historical subjectivities of various Queer, Indigenous, post-colonial, and other marginalized communities. And indeed, such enterprises and the rise of participatory and collaborative archiving can surely also be seen as examples of ‘collectivization’ and ‘socialization’ or even of ‘the dialectics between the individual and the society’–the very conditions of politics and historicity that Étienne Balibar (2024) sees ‘the digital’ as precluding.

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Source.

Goran Gaber (2025): “Mind the Gap. On archival politics and historical theory in the digital age,” Rethinking History, (accessed online at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13642529.2025.2545029)