Events

CALL FOR PAPERS DEADLINE: 10 JULY 2026

Digital technologies have significantly transformed our societies. Indeed, the digital has become infrastructural for the function of society. E-commerce, social media platforms, applications, digital payment systems, and AI tools have become deeply embedded in social organization, power relations, and everyday life, and nowhere more so than in Asia. This seminar adopts an infrastructural approach to exploring the profound implications of digital transformation. It defines infrastructure as a ubiquitous organizational means for human and non-human things, exhibiting characteristics such as reliability, invisibility, adaptability, and gateway functions. Infrastructuralization, then, refers to the process through which a digital technology becomes infrastructure.

Using the digital as an entry point, this workshop aims to develop a more comprehensive framework for interdisciplinary enquiry and collaboration. We are broadly interested in work on the digital that addresses the ways that these novel social forms are becoming infrastructural. How do we determine whether a particular digital technology has become infrastructure? How does the digital constitute new forms of spatiality and shape societies and social life in specific ways? How does this theorization intersect with processes such as urbanization, territorialization, platformization, and globalization? What do the organizational, spatial, material, economic, legal, sociocultural, ecological, and ideological processes of infrastructuralization look like? Given the contextual variability and complexity of digital transformation, this workshop invites scholars to engage with three interconnected themes: agency, contingency, and possibility. 

Agency: The infrastructuralization of the digital has put new capacities in play that are not clearly possessed by either states, corporations, groups, or individuals. An infrastructure approach asks what light this may shed on state-making, forms of hegemony, digital access, and infrastructural violence. Which actors are using the digital, and how? What are the conditions under which the digital serves as enabling or disabling force vis-à-vis certain individual aspirations, collective movements, and national objectives?  How do usage and accessibility constitute hierarchies, inequalities, and forms of exclusion?

Contingency: The digital produces not only intended, desirable outcomes, but also unintended effects, revealing a pervasive contingency. Throughout the processes of infrastructuralization, what outcomes and effects are produced, and how are they produced? Do actors, such as governments, enterprises, groups, and individuals, use the digital in the ways they were designed to be used? Why or why not?  How are these outcomes and effects similar or different across countries and contexts?

Possibility: An infrastructure approach to the digital foregrounds inherently transnational, interregional, and comparative perspectives, inviting scholars to move beyond the logic of linear progression which often underlies colonist and developmentalist approaches. What other, more diverse perspectives on the ways societies progress today does this make visible? How can examining the practical, ethnographic, and theoretical implications of infrastructuralizing the digital, allow us to acknowledge the hegemony and violence constitutive of the digital, but also to explore possibilities for a more just and hopeful world?

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

This workshop invites contributions grounded in empirically grounded in ethnographic and other forms of qualitative research conducted primarily in Asia. Paper proposals should include a title, an abstract (maximum 300 words), and a brief personal biography (about 150 words), and be submitted by 10 July 2026. Please specify details such as methodology, fieldsites, length of fieldwork, number of participants, and sources of data. Additionally, please include a statement confirming that your proposed paper has not been published or committed elsewhere, and that you are willing to revise the version of your paper presented at the workshop for potential inclusion in a special issue. Please submit your proposal using the form available on the website. An AI-use disclaimer is required for submission.

Authors of selected proposals will be notified by the mid of August 2026. Presenters will be required to submit short draft papers (between 3,000-5,000 words) by 18 January 2027. These papers will be distributed to fellow speakers and chairpersons prior to the workshop and do not need to be fully polished.

This workshop will be held in person. Full or partial airfare funding will be offered to overseas participants, as well as three nights of accommodation in Singapore. Please indicate your funding needs in the proposal form.

WORKSHOP CONVENORS

Dr Xiaoling CHEN | Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore
Asst Prof Dylan BRADY | Department of Geography, National University of Singapore
Prof Tim BUNNELL | Asia Research Institute & Department of Geography, National University of Singapore
Dr Elisabeth PEYROUX | The French National Centre for Scientific Research & Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore