Overview

This book marks an important contribution to the fascinating debate on the role that information infrastructures and boundary objects play in contemporary life, bringing to the fore the concern of how cooperation across different groups is enabled, but also constrained, by the material and immaterial objects connecting them. As such, the book itself is situated at the crossroads of various paths and genealogies, all focusing on the problem of the intersection between different levels of scale throughout devices, networks, and society. Information infrastructures allow, facilitate, mediate, saturate and influence people s material and immaterial surroundings. They are often shaped and intertwined with networks of relations and distributed agency, sometimes enabling the existence of such networks, and being, in turn, produced by them. Such infrastructures are not static and immobile in time and space: rather, they require maintenance and repair, which becomes an important aspect of their use. They also define and cross more or less visible boundaries, shape and act as ecologies, and constitute themselves as multiple entities. The various chapters of this edited book question the role of information infrastructures in various settings from both a theoretical and an empirical viewpoint, reflecting the contributors interests in science and technology studies, organization studies, and information science, as well as mobilities and media studies.

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9781322607665

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Alessandro Mongili is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Padua, Italy. He is also affiliated with the Padova Science, Technology and Innovation Studies Center (PaSTIS), and is the author of La chute de l'U.R.S.S. et la recherche scientifique (L'Harmattan, 1998) and Tecnologia e societa (Carocci, 2007). His current research interests and publications focus on design and development practices in computing, and on the relevance of computing in the standardization of minority languages. Giuseppina Pellegrino is a Lecturer in Sociology of Communication at the University of Calabria, Italy. Her core research interests intersect STS and mobilities, as well as media, gender and organization studies. A Visiting Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, Lancaster University, IAS-STS (Graz) and TU Darmstadt, she was appointed as Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer in Italian Studies at the University of Pittsburgh in 2013. Her publications include the edited book The Politics of Proximity: Mobility and Immobility in Practice (Ashgate, 2011).

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