Politics of Open Infrastructures

This 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 deeply political arrangements that embed values, distribute power, and shape whose knowledge counts.Bringing together scholars from science and technology studies, critical data studies, media studies, and political sociology, this edited volume explores openness as an ongoing socio-technical process rather than a fixed ideal. The contributions 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.Across theoretical chapters and rich empirical case studies, the book investigates the governance of open infrastructures, the politics of alternative technological arrangements, and struggles for epistemic justice within knowledge systems. Cases range from open internet standards and public sector data infrastructures to community networks, generative image platforms, feminist archives, agrobiodiversity databases, open access publishing, and open-source intelligence in conflict reporting.By foregrounding power relations, ethical tensions, and questions of responsibility, this book rethinks openness as a site of political negotiation rather than a technical solution. The volume 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 environments.A companion website for this volume is available at https://openinfrastructures.net/