Is It Configure-Able?

This research project engages crip and queer methods to experimentally and collectively (dis)orient the norms and limits of network infrastructure towards more life-affirming possibilities. Building on feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS) (Suchman 2012; Amoore 2020), the thesis interrogates the deterministic configurations, prescribed roles and relations that hold organizational and network infrastructures in place, while taking up crip and queer methods to further examine how such infrastructures create hard systems that reinforce ableist conceptions of use, access, and knowledge. Through the disobedient methods, practices and politics offered by Disability Justice, crip and queer theory (Ahmed 2006; Kafer 2013; 2023; Hamraie 2017; 2023; Rice et al. 2024), I question the inherited figures of configuration (such as “users”) and develop alternative ways of manifesting systems that are people-powered and center the needs of collectives instead of configuring people into infrastructural elements. Combining critique with practice, the thesis generates collective methods for making wiggle room (Ahmed 2014; Pritchard 2022) in network infrastructures for soft, situated, indeterminate, and misfitting embodied knowledges and emergent forms of collective life.

My research undertakes three inquiries into what configure-able infrastructures can be in action. Rather than abstract systems, these collective infrastructuring practices are situated, shaped, and manifested by specific contexts and bodies. In the first inquiry, I reflect on my practices and experiences of access making, examining how the misfitting of collective access and access riders can shape configurations from sites of friction. The second inquiry is grounded in collaboration with In-grid collective, a Trans*Feminist digital arts collective, exploring how critical access can inform collective intersectional practice from the outset, instead of being added on afterward. The final inquiry manifests crip network infrastructures by and for disabled people through work on the Cozy-Cloud, a crip server and collaborative practice. By making room for disabled people to form their own expertise, practices and knowledge of network infrastructures, it becomes possible to disorient the sedimented configurations of hard technical systems, and to form counter configure-able infrastructures that unfold from embodied knowledges, experiences and collective practices.

From these inquiries, the thesis offers methods and practices for disorienting the normative configurations of infrastructures through crip and queer forms of “misfitting” when accessing and using these systems, and the collective sense-making that unfolds. By making wiggle room around misfitting, this research not only validates but builds from the embodied knowing and frictious expertise of systems. These inquiries share how collaborators and I have started to make room for our own configure-able infrastructures through interdependent practices of access making and knowing.

This thesis does not offer solutions or cures to the misfitting of network infrastructures, collective organizing and their configurational methods, but surfaces how crip and queer methods can make room for the frictions of misfitting expertise and practices that can take them off course, and towards the affirming futures we desire now.