InfrAgent
About project
The InfrAgent project (Charles University, Czechia, Tampere University, Finland) explores the possibilities of sociological inquiry into human agency within current digital infrastructures. Nowadays, technological changes put human action in a different light, and human action is beginning to reflect off the new digital culture in previously unexpected ways.
Digital culture, resistance and human agency as a problem
Empirically, there is a salient infrastructuring of AI and other digital tools across most communication and work practices, including educational practices, also enabled by the political context of the current process of European recovery after the COVID pandemic, which relies on “non-human” technologies and digitalisation as the main solution of all problems while assuming various forms of human agency dealing with the digital. AI products are beginning to be plugged into all communication technologies and, in a sense, are becoming inevitable for people to use and be used by. Also, a kind of resistance was observed in the case of a suggested label “human-made” or “not by AI” within public discourse, similar to the older debates about the value of human-hand-made objects, or the organic origin of food (Bio). The issue of the value of human teachers and digi-tech-free didactics is raised again. These shifting expressions and dynamics of resistance to AI and digitalisation also affect the way human agency (HA) matters.
From this context follows these questions:
- How human agency matters in current digital infrastructures? How is the meaning of human agency made through the infrastructuring of these digital tools?
- And, in what contexts is human action articulated as a problem when interacting with digital infrastructures?
- Relatedly, on the theoretical level, I ask how questions of human agency matter in current infrastructure studies within post-human and more-than-human ontologies.
Is sociology enough for human agency?
The InfrAgent project focuses on the social and topological dimensions of human action and develops an innovative approach that uses philosophy and artistic action to explore them within the process of infrastructuring digital in and of education. I use the processual and dynamic term “infrastructuring” to approach the empirical terrain, i.e., the developing infrastructures within the framework of the ongoing expansion of the European Commission’s NextGenerationEU (NGEU) plan in the Czech Republic, a country from the post-socialist region that is rather overlooked in current research.
First, I address the conceptual and methodological obstacles for analysing human agency sociologically. In attempting to bring human agency back into focus, I got inspired by two rich cultural traditions of reflection that have never abandoned explicit exploration of human agency: philosophy and art. Drawing on existing sociological approaches to social ontology, namely processual sociology and relational sociology, which I connect to the work begun by relational philosophy, I focus on the social and topological dimension of human action.
Multiple methodologies
The aim of the project is to develop a qualitative relational methodology that will use innovative techniques to analyse how human agency in digital infrastructures in education is imagined, assumed, attracted and newly created in an effort to build infrastructure and renew education at national and European levels. The main methodological pillars of InfrAgent (participation, processuality and interdisciplinarity) create a significant scientific contribution:
- they explicitly focus on human agency, which has been neglected in infrastructure studies so far,
- they take into account both the mobilities and stabilities created by infrastructures,·
- they recognise the relationship between place, actor and action.
InfrAgent will contribute to building viable and equitable infrastructures in education by focusing on the exclusion of certain human activities and actors, the underestimation of the potential of human action in digitalisation processes, and unrealistically planned human responsibilities. InfrAgent’s methodological innovation will be made publicly available.