Science and Technology Studies Approaches to Internet Governance: Controversies and Infrastructures as Internet Politics

Abstract

International audience ; Research seeking to bridge Internet governance research with approaches in science and technology studies (STS) began growing in the second decade of the 2000s. Complementary to predominantly institutional approaches that set the agenda for Internet governance research in its early days-and are still prominently featured in it-STS approaches consider the agency of technology designers, policy makers, and users as they interact, in a distributed fashion, with technologies, rules, and regulations, leading to consequences with systemic effects that may, at times, be unintended. Social and political ordering is understood as a set of ongoing and contested processes-an ensemble of mundane practices that contribute to maintaining, hacking, circumventing, developing, testing, or using the Internet. This chapter provides an overview of the current ways in which STS approachesare being applied to Internet governance research, and in particular, it focuses on controversy studies and infrastructure studies as two subsets of conceptual and methodological tools that are gaining increasing traction.