Program: Infrastructures of Publics – Publics of Infrastructures

The first annual conference of the Collaborative Research Center 1187 " Media of Cooperation " addresses the crossing over of two overarching research perspectives on cooperative media practices: Infrastructures and their publics on the one hand and publics and their infrastructures on the other. The conference scrutinizes publics and infrastructures not separately but in their constitutive interrelations, which allow publics and infrastructures to come into being in the first place. The conference takes a praxeological approach, discussing historical and current processes of cooperative media practices as infrastructuring and making public(s). It involves a wide range of disciplines including Anthropology, Media Studies, History, Social Sciences, and Informatics. The conference assembles national and international experts who contribute to research and theories on 'analog' and 'digital' forms of the production and design of different publics and infrastructures. Media Studies understood in this broad way builds on concepts of networked issue publics or societies (Noortje Marres) and experimental publics and cooperative thought (Paul Kockelman). It opens up new perspectives on publics and their media infrastructures.