The Politics of Open Infrastructures
Power, Governance, and Justice in Digital Knowledge Practices
Edited by Katja Mayer, Astrid Mager and Renée Ridgway
Open Book Publishers 2026
This companion website, openinfrastructures.net, extends the edited volume The Politics of Open Infrastructures: Power, Governance, and Justice in Digital Knowledge Practices. In the coming months it will bring together author interviews, supplementary materials and additional resources that document the making of the book and offer further insights into current debates on governing, sustaining and contesting open digital knowledge infrastructures.
The volume examines how openness is designed, governed, contested and lived in contemporary digital knowledge infrastructures. From open source software and internet standards to citizen science platforms, public sector data systems and alternative computing practices, the book shows that infrastructures are never neutral technical backbones. They are political arrangements that embed values, distribute power and shape whose knowledge counts.
Bringing together perspectives from science and technology studies, critical data studies, media studies, organisation studies, arts-based research and political sociology, the book understands openness as an ongoing socio-technical process rather than a fixed ideal. Its chapters move from the partial openness of early internet standards and free and open source software, through contested practices of opening government data and public infrastructures, to struggles over inclusion and governance in scholarly and cultural knowledge infrastructures. The volume then turns to community-driven experiments in care, repair and alternative openness, before concluding with forward-looking contributions on how to keep infrastructures open for research, how to fund infrastructures as digital commons and how to mobilise open infrastructures for democratic resilience and economic sovereignty.
Across theoretical chapters and empirical case studies, the contributors trace how principles such as accessibility, transparency, participation and collective stewardship are enacted in practice, and how they are challenged by commercial capture, asymmetries of expertise, cultural governance and geopolitical inequalities. The book investigates the governance of open infrastructures, the politics of alternative technological arrangements and struggles for epistemic justice within knowledge systems.
By foregrounding power relations, ethical tensions and questions of responsibility, The Politics of Open Infrastructures rethinks openness as a site of political negotiation rather than a technical solution. It offers critical insights for researchers, policymakers, engineers and civil society actors concerned with digital commons, democratic governance and the future of open knowledge infrastructures in increasingly contested political and technical environments.