Infrapolitics, Archival infrastructures and Digital Reparative Practices

Somewhere in the interstitial spaces of digital infrastructure, we might find another way of living" 1 . Archival imaginaries and infrastructuresThe accumulation, storage, and management of information in today's big data infrastructures, while unprecedented, raise important questions that have long been at the heart of cultural theories of the archive.Today's information infrastructures, we posit, often repurpose a familiar problematic in postcolonial and feminist archive theories: while archives are always beset by racist and gendered biases, knowledge gaps and traces of violence, they can also represent an opportunity to confront such biases and to complement the absences of the archives with materials and narratives that center the experiences of documented communities (Risam 2018: 47).In this chapter, we draw on the work of the Uncertain Archives research group 2 to reflect upon how such archival problematics manifest themselves in information infrastructures and to think about the conditions for intervening in and reimagining such infrastructures.We begin from the premise that the digital infrastructures into which information is now gathered display continuities with earlier archival imaginaries and epistemologies, but that they also bear witness to shifts -namely in technology and scale -that require critical attention.Indeed, such information infrastructures are governed by complex sets of protocols and standards, by human-machinic processes and by an unprecedented scale of information that magnify political and epistemological questions that have previously been addressed within the "archival turn" in the humanities (Stoler 2002): questions about access, selection, exclusion, omissions, harmful exposure and reductive classification (Chun and Friedland 2015;Nakamura, 2004; Noble, 2019;Sutherland, 2017).We thus argue that while digital infrastructures often appear as new modes of information management that render older forms of archival order obsolete, digital infrastructures in fact often repeat-with a difference-the imaginaries, epistemologies, injustices, and anxieties exemplified by previous archival orders (Agostinho et al 2019).A focus on infrastructures, we argue, is useful in this context because a sociopolitical reading of information infrastructures can help us to emphasize how social structures such as gender and race are encoded in the technological scaffolding of information, how infrastructures therefore reflect and materialize power dynamics, and how they thereby structure the possibilities for social action.With this we wish to emphasize that infrastructures enforce and constrain experience and knowledge, but also constitute powerful venues for social and political engagement.Combining cultural theories and 1 Deb Verhoeven, "As Luck Would Have It.Serendipity and Solace in Digital Research Infrastructure", 12.