Anne Beaulieu, University of Groningen

Materiality and knowledge production intersect in knowledge infrastructures (KIs), making KIs an especially important point of both analysis and intervention. This intersection shapes and is shaped by dynamics of datafication of the material world, obduracy and legacy of infrastructures, extraction of labour by configuring users, and assetization of nature. As a large KI that foregrounds citizen science, eBird is a useful case to understand how infrastructures mediate between knowledge and planetary matter through (1) demand for material resources—technologies, energy, facilities (2) consumption patterns of those who engage with the KI (3) cumulative infrastructural effects on knowledge produced through KIs (4) orientation to interacting with the material world as resource. KI hold potential as sites to develop better planetary relations that contribute to liveable futures.

Prof. dr. Anne Beaulieu holds the Aletta Jacobs Chair of Knowledge Infrastructures at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. She is co-author of Data and Society: A Critical Introduction (Sage, 2021), of Smart Grids from a Global Perspective (Springer, 2016), and of Virtual Knowledge: Experimenting in the Humanities and Social Sciences (MIT Press, 2012). She also chairs the editorial board of the Liveable Futures book series at Amsterdam University Press. In 2023-24, she was joint fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study and of the Data Science Centre at the University of Amsterdam. Between 2018 and 2022, she co-coordinated the PhD training network of the Netherlands Graduate Research School of Science, Technology and Modern Culture (WTMC).