Infrastructuring neighbourhood publics : local responses to infrastructural breakdown during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Digital civics is a research agenda for collaborative research together with citizens and community groups in North East England. Here, I apply this to work with a local collaborative of community groups and organisations. The collaborative works to mitigate the compounded impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and public sector austerity on their neighbourhood. Publics are shared issues, a prism for understanding the work by the collaborative in a complex and heterogenous context. To the material theories of publics I contribute an analytical vocabulary based on Discourse Theory, for contextualising material practices, and understanding the affective drivers of collaboration. Infrastructuring is an analytical and designerly method, used to understand the response of the collaborative to the infrastructural breakdown induced by the pandemic. In addition, I structure a small-scale, remote infrastructuring process around a website, used as a playful trigger. I ask the following research questions: How does the collaborative infrastructure their responses to infrastructural breakdown? What shared issues can be identified through the prism of publics? Is infrastructuring publics a suitable frame for tracing and quilting shared issues? I find that the shifting configuration of human and non-human actors shapes the understanding of the shared issue of mutual aid in the neighbourhood, as a material public moves from from an ad-hoc, social media-based response to a classification infrastructure. Regarding the use of Zoom as a stand-in for face-to-face communication, I find that there is an affective lack in video calls for collaborative work, and a complex set of issues for different service users. I find that digital and non-digital practices are developed in response to issues with Zoom use. Some of these localised practices address social isolation, which is then contextualised within austerity localism. I find that this drives a key shared issue within the collaborative, (the avoidance of) duplication.