Hello AoIR! If your research touches on how governments are reshaped by data infrastructures, tech vendors, and/or automated decision systems, I hope you consider submitting an abstract to the open panel I'm organizing at 4S this year. Details are below and if you have any questions, please feel free to email me at bbaykurt@umass.edu. 250-word abstracts are due April 30th. *Panel ID: 248 Remaking the State: Moral Economies of Gov-Tech and Automated Governance* As automated systems become embedded in everyday statecraft, they reconfigure not only how governments operate but what governments are. This panel starts from the premise that contemporary techno-power is co-produced through state institutions that increasingly govern through code, contracts, and data. Across areas such as welfare administration, tax systems, border control, public databases, and urban governance, government data infrastructures are assetized, state legibility is monetized, and governing knowledge becomes vendor-dependent.
From major firms such as Palantir to smaller vendors aspiring to become the “Google of” housing, transportation, public health, or immigration data, gov-tech firms insert themselves in everyday practices of public administration. What values and moral claims justify sharing state capacity with technology vendors? How do procurement regimes carve out new boundaries between public and private authority? And how do bureaucrats, civil society actors, and grassroots movements contest and reimagine the role and limits of state-held data? These questions probe the moral economies underlying state-tech partnerships, especially as they increasingly intersect with right-wing and authoritarian political projects and with technological experiments explicitly mobilized to enforce racist, anti-immigration, and anti-poor logics.
The panel invites theoretical and empirical papers drawing on STS, political economy, and critical infrastructure studies to develop frameworks to intervene in how state authority is dramatized, contested, and monetized through data infrastructures. Submissions addressing cases in the Global Majority and pursuing comparative approaches are particularly welcome.