Sociotechnical Infrastructures and Textures of Care

This article explores the possibilities and limitations of care within sociotechnical infrastructures, including semi-automated, bureaucratic, and machine learning systems. Emerging from an ongoing research project that started during the global pandemic and grounded in ethics of care approaches, our project critically interrogates how such infrastructures not only create conditions for care but also reconfigure care itself to align with their underlying ideologies and discourses. Drawing on theories of care, particularly María Puig de la Bellacasa’s (2017) conceptualization of work-affect-politics, the article examines the politics and practices of care shaped by grant management infrastructures that underpin academic work. These infrastructures are framed as contexts where social actors and technological artifacts interweave into unified systems, and in the context of this article refer to the lived experiences of conducting research. Ultimately, the article argues that sociotechnical infrastructures function as “conditions of possibility” for care, and as indicative of the now-endemic ways that work-affect-politics is enmeshed in sociotechnical infrastructures.