Infrastructural Storytelling: A Methodological Approach for Narrating Environmental (In)justice in Technical and Professional Communication

ABSTRACT

This article offers infrastructural storytelling as a methodological approach attuned to the emplaced dynamics of digital infrastructure. Countering the clean progress narratives of sustainability reports in the technology sector, this approach follows digital infrastructure to two locations: San Francisco, California (Google) and Toronto, Ontario (Digital Realty). Infrastructural storytelling explicates how physical infrastructures produce uneven social, political, and economic realities by investing in some ways of life over others.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital technologies
• emerging technologies
• storytelling
• environmental justice
• infrastructure

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Many scholars have traced the colonial roots of fiber optic cable networks, showing that these networks, which tangle around the planet in strategic places (underground and sea), are not without their imperial precursors (Starosielski, 2015). As Bridle (2018) explained, “Our thirst for data … is historically imperialist and colonialist, and tightly tied to capitalist networks of exploitation” (p. 208). Bridle contended that imperial legacies are grafted onto fiber optic cable maps; they are indicators of imperial routes of expansion, domination, and violence. Data centers, although a newer infrastructural node of modern communications networks, have also been described as tools of settler colonialism, as they “play a hand at furthering settler futurity” by “stak[ing] a claim to land and its proximity to water” and “further locat[ing] humanity outside of human bodies, and into machines” (Hogan, 2018, p. 640).

2. Unsettling does not fashion itself as a decolonial project. For Cameron (2016), as for us, such a claim “nudges too closely toward settler desires to be ‘good’ in the face of colonial relations and moves too quickly toward a reconciliation or resolution” (p. 20). Crucially, unsettling does not entail a move to innocence by attempting to inhabit storytelling traditions we have not inherited, nor does it entail a re-centering of white guilt or experiences over all else.

3. While we came to Wilfredo Flores’s (2022) dissertation too late to substantially include in this article, Flores’s theory of “intersectional internet as land” offers another storytelling path to follow. Flores offers “a critical approach to technology, and specifically the internet, that at once spotlights and admonishes its connection to settler colonialism as a marginalizing force while foregrounding how BIPOC use technology to disrupt injustice and empower themselves, often in their everyday communicative practices” (p. 49). This critical and crucial approach doesn’t “linger in death and colonization’s overreach” (p. 72). Instead, while not losing focus on the intersections between settler colonialism and technology, Flores also follows the “activisms around the world – locally discrete but globally linked – that flourish through and with the internet” (p. 73). These stories deserve careful attention too.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dustin W. Edwards

Dustin W. Edwards is an assistant professor of Rhetoric and Writing Studies at San Diego State University. His research attends to the material, ecological, and infrastructural dimensions of digital rhetoric and engages story-based methodologies to emphasize how particular lands, waterways, and communities are affected by planetary digital networks. His work has been published in Computers and Composition, Enculturation, Present Tense, and Rhetoric Review, as well as in edited collections.

Bridget Gelms

Bridget Gelms is an assistant professor in the English department at San Francisco State University, where she teaches courses in technical communication, social media rhetorics, document design, and team writing. She is also the co-director of the College Undergraduate Research Experience in SFSU’s College of Liberal and Creative Arts. Her work has appeared in Computers and Composition, Composition Forum, and Enculturation, among other journals and edited collections. She recently won Computers & Composition’s Ellen Nold Outstanding Article Award for her 2022 piece on research methodologies and social media harassment.

Rich Shivener

Rich Shivener is an assistant professor in the Writing Department at York University. His latest research investigates digital media writing practices and emotions, and he teaches courses in the department’s digital cultures stream. Rich has been a special issue editor for Technical Communication Quarterly. He is a section editor for Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy.