** Call for abstracts ** Infrastructuring AI. A view from the Global South / STS Italia Conference Milan, Italy, 11-13 June 2025. Panel organisers: Iginio Gagliardone, Wits University; Stefania Milan, University of Amsterdam Unprecedented efforts are underway to harness Artificial Intelligence (AI) “for good”. Unlike earlier initiatives using digital technologies to spur economic growth and improve service delivery, this new wave of digital innovation is fraught with ambivalence and complexity. While familiar narratives persist—portraying low-income countries as needing to “catch up”— new dynamics are surfacing. These include pushback against top-down innovation and fresh visions of the Global South’s role in digital transformation. These tensions— rooted both in lived experiences and conceptual innovations —reflect the evolving stakes of digital progress. Many individuals and groups have experienced first-hand the dramatic fading of the expectations digital tools will serve as “liberation technologies”. They have also long questioned the promises of benevolent connectedness or entrepreneurship made by large tech corporations, whose hypocrisy has been dramatically exposed by a steady stream of leaks— from former Facebook employee Francis Haugen to Uber executive Mark MacGann. Conceptually, innovative scholarship emerging at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies (STS), decolonial theory, and “computing in/from the South” is giving visibility both to legacies of colonial domination and to locally rooted forms of imagination and innovation. These reinvigorated efforts at decolonizing scholarship, as well as tech infrastructures and platforms, has begun offering new frameworks to interpret technological development. They challenge persistent stereotypes of low-income countries being condemned to uncritically replicate innovations from the Global North, while stressing new forms of agency in imagining distinct technological futures. With respect to AI, this means paying attention to “ground realities”, centering the understanding of AI in the experiences and standpoints of particular geographies and communities, and in their histories. To account for the complex interactions and the effects of these forces, this panel ask three orders of questions, accounting for infrastructure evolution, methods, and epistemological questions. First, this panel seeks to analyse applications of AI as they interface with pre-existing infrastructures, and thus need to relate to long term trajectories of innovation, as well to localised visions and materialities. For example, how do AI-powered surveillance interact with existing forms of control and policing? How electricity- and water-hungry data centres emerge in countries struggling to provide these basic services to their citizens? Do legacy infrastructures deployed by specific external actors (e.g. US or Chinese companies) make it more likely to acquire AI-powered solutions from the same sources?
From a methodological standpoint, we welcome studies that are able to critically interrogate processes of innovation, follow the multiple cycles through which power and technology interact, disclosing opportunities for some, but silently excluding others.
Finally, from an epistemological perspective, we invite colleagues to explore how we can rethink the relation between AI and infrastructure from a Global South perspective. What theoretical building blocks can help to expand the rubric of STS for the Majority World? Here we seek to go beyond case studies to expand the theoretical toolbox of the discipline. For submission guidelines and panel details (panel no. 55) visit: https://stsitalia.org/call-for-abstracts/#theme Deadline for submissions: 3 February 2025