ABSTRACT
In this chapter, a renewal of domestication studies with the help of infrastructure studies is proposed. Today, domestication continues to support researchers in their empirical investigations of how technologies become an indispensable part of their users’ lives. However, after another 30 years of introduction of technologies into the domestic sphere and everyday life, some of the theoretical underpinnings are starting to show their age: in both its media studies and its science and technology studies version, domestication presupposes that technologies enter from ‘the outside’ (of the home, of everyday life), bringing something ‘foreign’ with it, which has to be reconciled with the familiar of ‘the inside.’ This basic idea has produced what is here called the old stakes of domestication: to assert, study and ultimately also defend the users’ agency in the face of capitalist markets and technological systems. That homes and everyday life today are suffused with devices that are constantly connected to massive infrastructures means that drawing a line between an inside and an outside becomes increasingly difficult. In the adaptation of domestication studies to these new realities, infrastructure studies provide a rich set of tools, which are presented in this chapter. Domestication recast as user-led infrastructuring focuses on user activities connected to the display of (non-)participation in infrastructures, but also on how users manage incremental change, articulation and maintenance of existing infrastructures. In turn, domestication studies provide to the study of infrastructures well-developed tools for studying the user-facing side of infrastructuring.
