Ecology of programmable infrastructures in the context of the administration of justice

Partners: Delft University & Tilburg University
Type: Postdoc
Duration: 2023-2026

Project description

Current discussions in the public sector on the "cloud" are typically reduced to data protection and digital sovereignty, providing limited opportunity to grasp the massive transformation that the adoption of cloud and mobile devices bring about for public institutions. Over the last decade and a half, we have been observing the increasing entanglement of the delivery of digital services and these computational infrastructures. Software production, the practices and material conditions necessary to deliver (AI based) services, has become a way to expand these infrastructures into different sectors. Marketed with the promise of making organizations as programmable as computational systems, these services are expected to bring with them improvements in the management of resources and economic gains. In the process, they require organizations to subscribe to technical and financial models that are likely to have broader political and economic impact than is currently imagined.

This postdoctoral position is an opportunity to go beyond current approaches to studying the impact of cloud and mobile infrastructures. The candidate is invited to study empirically how these computational infrastructures expand into sectoral organizations and to evaluate whether current digital policies are adequate in responding to their impact on the administration of justice. To do so, the project takes a political economy emphasis and a materialist approach aimed to explore the technical, organizational and institutional transformations brought about by the introduction of computational Infrastructures with an eye on how these come to shape the administration of justice. A deeper understanding of how computational infrastructures reconfigure both public organizations and the administration of justice will serve to evaluate how these are, or are, not reflected in existing digital policies aimed to govern these developments (e.g., a Cloud-first government agenda for public institutions).