Alan Liu

Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities focuses centrally on the stake that the digital humanities have taken in current critical infrastructure studies. It brings the infrastructural approach into the spotlight as an area where DH is uniquely equipped to lead the humanities. The book’s goal is to explore how DH can influence thought and practice in the general arena of infrastructural studies; and, reciprocally, how infrastructural approaches in that broader arena can influence DH. In doing so, the book brings forward for attention to a broad scholarly audience the current state of infrastructure studies as “critical” (and as an intervention in the nature of critique itself). Global, social, and disciplinary diversity are overarching emphases. Chapters discuss the global dimensions of infrastructure (e.g., in relation to the environment and logistics systems) and focus on varied world regions and nations; social concerns related to decolonization, Indigenous peoples, underrepresented (and under-networked) communities, feminism, multilingualism, and labor justice; and a wide variety of disciplines or fields bearing on DH, including  book studies, East and South Asian studies, environmental studies, feminist studies, Indigenous studies, information science, labor studies, library studies, media studies, platform studies, postcolonial studies, history of technology, and science-technology studies. To complement the historical, theoretical, and critical work of most of the chapters, a final section of the book includes briefer speculative, creative, or playful chapters offering position statements, what-if scenarios or plans, and multimodal arguments that imagine, and in some cases enact, on brio how DH infrastructures could be different and better. An innovative feature of the book is its set of “infrastructure manifests” declaring the infrastructure that its editors’ and authors’ used for making their chapters or projects.