International Journal of Communication 20(2026) Digital Infrastructure Intermediaries
Infrastructure Intermediaries: A Framework for Digital Infrastructure Research
University of Michigan, USA
LISA PARKS
University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
NICOLE STAROSIELSKI
University of California, Berkeley, USA
JULIA VELKOVA
Linköping University, Sweden
Over the past 2 decades, scholars have turned their attention to digital infrastructures—the data centers, fiber-optic cables, satellites, towers, and interconnection facilities that carry Internet traffic—yet research on these systems remains fragmented across disciplines, institutions, and industries and siloed in specialized domains. This article introduces the concept of the infrastructure intermediary, arguing that media and communication scholars are uniquely positioned to mediate across the epistemic, institutional, and technological boundaries that shape infrastructural systems. Drawing on media and communication studies and adjacent fields, we advance an interdisciplinary framework for researching digital infrastructures in an era of climate disruption, artificial intelligence–related technological change, and regulatory uncertainty. The framework outlines approaches for infrastructure researchers to intervene collaboratively alongside affected communities, policy makers, and industry professionals, positioning scholars as active participants in building more equitable, sustainable, and just infrastructural futures. We close with an inventory of interventions for future research.
Keywords: digital infrastructure, research methods, technology studies, policy studies, industry studies, community-based research
Germaine Halegoua: [email protected]
Lisa Parks: [email protected]
Nicole Starosielski: [email protected]
Julia Velkova: [email protected]
Date submitted: 2025-10-20
Over the past 20 years, scholars have conducted research on the emerging physical installations that support Internet, broadcast television, and telephone traffic. These systems include data centers (hyperscale, colocation, enterprise, and edge), interconnection facilities (such as Internet exchange points and points of presence), subsea and terrestrial fiber-optic cables, satellites and earth stations, and microwave and cellular towers, among others. Researchers across disciplines have studied these changing systems, variously characterizing them as telecommunications networks; information and communication technologies; big tech platforms; and media, communication, and information infrastructures. These facilities and their associated technologies have been categorized as the first mile, middle mile, and last mile of digital connection. Both scholars and the people who build, operate, maintain, and decommission cables, data centers, cell towers, and earth stations now largely understand these technologies as digital infrastructure: integrated systems that support the transmission, storage, and processing of data.
The expansion of digital infrastructure has become a pressing concern in recent years. While governments and organizations in some regions are building basic digital infrastructure, global capitalist dynamics and rapid technological changes—especially in artificial intelligence (AI)—have driven a massive expansion of data centers, subsea and terrestrial cables, and satellite mega-constellations in low-earth orbit. Access to digital infrastructure has not only become more critical for sustaining livelihoods but is often tethered to expensive facilities centralized in relatively few areas. As a result, disparities in digital access across nations and regions have widened dramatically (Ali, 2021; Dijk & Hacker, 2003; Donner, 2015; Ragnedda & Gladkova, 2020). As data once stored on local computers have moved to the cloud, essential infrastructure, from water and electricity systems to financial and health services, has become dependent on remote data centers linked by fiber-optic networks (Crawford, 2021; Holt, 2024; Parks et al., 2023).
At the same time, climate change is affecting digital infrastructure: It is not only disrupting operations, but also shifting approaches to siting (Lawrence, 2020) and facility resilience. Crucially, climate impacts are conditioned by local geographies, histories, and geopolitics (Kotliar & Gekker, 2024; Tang, 2020) and, increasingly, hinge on growing risks of extreme weather (Leyda & Negra, 2015). While infrastructures have been built in floodplains, along shorelines, atop windy mountain peaks, and beneath restless seas for centuries, the scale and harsh conditions of climate disruption may outpace humans’ ability to imagine, prepare for, or respond to them. International conflicts also threaten the continuity of digital infrastructure facilities. Researchers must continue to study and deliberate what it means to build, operate, update, and sustain digital infrastructure when conditions of climate and geopolitical disruption can so quickly compromise it.
Crucial scholarship in media and communication studies has emphasized the histories of empire, unequal flows, and neocolonial and racial politics articulated with infrastructure (Aouragh & Chakravartty, 2016; Çelik, 2023; Larkin, 2013; Mukherjee, 2020; Winseck & Pike, 2007). This research has revealed the importance of studying digital infrastructure in specific historical, geopolitical, and cultural contexts, specifying infrastructure’s material, environmental, and affective relations, and continuing to reckon with troubling and violent pasts and presents. Scholars have also recognized the environmental, infrastructural, and societal damage digital infrastructure can perpetuate and have called for new governance approaches and forms of critique (Cellard et al., 2025; Edwards et al., 2025; Velkova, 2026). Researchers have documented the impact of digital infrastructure on carbon emissions, biodiversity, and e-waste supply chains (Gabrys, 2011; Zhou, 2023). Alongside academic investigations, international organizations such as the United Nations now recognize the significance of digital infrastructure to environmental sustainability and human rights work, and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) continues to develop standards for sustainable digital infrastructure (ITU, 2024; United Nations Environment Programme, 2024).
Despite clear links among digital infrastructure, sustainability, and human rights, many national regulatory agencies seem unprepared to address current conditions. Telecom and media deregulation, conglomeration, and big tech companies’ expansion across infrastructure sectors (DeNardis, 2012; Srnicek, 2016) continue to occur in a “regulatory hangover” in which regulators struggle to keep up with technological innovations and operations (Holt, 2024). Although the ITU is charged with facilitating international connectivity, the variation across uneven and disparate conditions makes the creation of universal standards, regulation, and oversight challenging and often inadequate (ITU, 2025).
Furthermore, digital infrastructures are not operated in the public interest, whether in democratic or authoritarian regimes, even as they scaffold public life. They have been organized to advance commercial and state interests first and foremost. In the European Union, regulation of digital infrastructure currently promotes the scaling up of Europe-wide AI computational and satellite infrastructure under the banner of digital sovereignty and innovation, but downplays the pressures these priorities place on struggles for social equality, trust, or Indigenous rights (Velkova, 2026). Other regions face similar challenges, intensified by the imperative to embrace AI. In the United States, government investment in the regulatory apparatus has diminished, and many elected officials are not sufficiently educated about digital infrastructure, although they are tasked with regulating it (Hatz et al., 2025).
The urgent need to understand and address these conditions requires new approaches to digital infrastructure research. It also invites new forms of practice, policy, and interaction and has motivated emergent experimental and collaborative research (Pasek et al., 2023). In this article, we reflect on existing research on infrastructures, including our own scholarship (Halegoua, 2020; Parks & Starosielski, 2015; Starosielski, 2015; Velkova, 2016), and attend to the power dynamics that shape such systems (Anand et al., 2018; Aouragh & Chakravartty, 2016; Greene, 2022; Johnson, 2019; Winseck, 2017). In sections that follow, we highlight regulatory, environmental, industrial, and social conditions that are reshaping how digital infrastructure is studied, generating new questions and inviting new approaches. We then conceptualize academics as infrastructure intermediaries, outlining emergent roles for media scholars as public university and private industry partnerships continue to expand.
Drawing on media studies research, we define the intermediary as an entity that mediates relations among actors. To function as an infrastructure intermediary is to work in and across the contexts in which digital infrastructures are designed, developed, regulated, and used. This stance foregrounds researchers’ dynamic positionalities within networks of people, industries, and sociotechnical relations (Latour, 2005) and clarifies the roles scholars can play in shaping more publicly engaged infrastructural development, oversight, and use.
This article reimagines media and communication scholars as infrastructure intermediaries committed to extending their work beyond the academy. This framework is oriented toward collaboration among actors with differing levels of agency, knowledge, and socioeconomic power. It grows out of our own research across a range of systems—from satellites to cell towers, fiber-optic cables, and data centers—and integrates these findings to open media infrastructure research to new directions and inflections. The approach requires close attention to siting and place, the entanglement of infrastructures with knowledge practices, a durational perspective on infrastructure life cycles, and gaps and inconsistencies in policy and regulation. In what follows, we explain how the concept emerged and articulate what it means to act as an intermediary. We then outline several key dimensions of digital infrastructure research before concluding with an inventory of possible interventions grounded in multistakeholder relations and social and environmental justice.
By envisioning media and communication scholars as infrastructure intermediaries—intra-acting with affected communities, planners, regulators, nonprofits, government officials, and professionals across digital infrastructure industries—we show that media studies has much to contribute to public understandings, policy proceedings, and professional practice surrounding the development, siting, and use of digital infrastructure. Our commitment to public-facing scholarship stems not only from our experiences working with infrastructure builders and impacted communities but also from a sense of responsibility as university employees whose work is supported by public funding. This responsibility includes the work of historicizing and critique, but it extends further to investigating, monitoring, raising awareness, offering feedback, consulting, and listening to and learning from diverse stakeholders. It also includes publicizing the tensions and challenges surrounding digital infrastructure that demand attention and action.
From Siloed Research to Multidisciplinary Coordination
Scholars in critical infrastructure studies have long recognized that infrastructure is a sociotechnical system and its operation is a social and relational process (Edwards, 2003; Parks & Starosielski, 2015; Plantin & Punathembekar, 2019). In the case of digital infrastructure, decisions about where to lay fiber-optic cables or construct data centers are made by a constellation of actors with differing knowledge, expertise, expectations, and power. These actors decide where infrastructure should be sited, whether a cable should pass through one location or another, and how facilities such as data centers are embedded in particular places. They also determine the intended lifespan and purposes of these systems, the materials from which they are made, and the range of human and nonhuman threats they must withstand. As these considerations are negotiated and materialized in physical installations, digital infrastructures come to reflect the human decisions, norms, social relations, and inequalities from which they emerge. Once in place, these infrastructures, in turn, can (re)produce those social relations, norms, and inequalities over time, though their effects remain contingent and never fully determinate.
Critical infrastructure researchers have explored the dynamism of sociotechnical relations and the labor and resources required to plan, manufacture, transport, install, operate, and maintain facilities and equipment (Parks et al., 2023; Parks & Starosielski, 2015). Instead of thinking about infrastructure as anchored, fixed, or static, scholars often approach human and nonhuman components as part of creativity/innovation, repurposing/renewal, maintenance, repair, and decommissioning (Jackson, 2014; Rosner, 2020). Critical infrastructure researchers also have analyzed relationships among regulation, industrial strategy, cultural and content practices, geography, and historical context. This body of work has been notably interdisciplinary and interinstitutional, drawing on fields such as engineering, computer science, geography, and anthropology, as well as insights from industry and policy reports. Increasingly, media scholars are incorporating interdisciplinary methods and the perspectives of multiple stakeholders into their infrastructure research (Bojczuk et al., 2024; Burrell, 2020; Rosa, 2022).
Despite infrastructure studies’ emphasis on relationality and interdisciplinarity, we find that the study of media infrastructure broadly and digital infrastructure, in particular, remains fragmented within academia, across disciplines, and between industry and academia. The tendency is deep specialization in specific components of digital infrastructure from disciplinary perspectives rather than working across boundaries to develop more complex and multifaceted understandings of digital infrastructures (Cath, 2023; Graham & Marvin, 2001).
The separate research genealogies of fiber-optic subsea cables, a core component of digital infrastructure, illustrate this point. Subsea fiber-optic cables have been a concern of academics and industry researchers since the technology’s inception. Since the 1980s, research on optical transmissions via subsea cables has been regularly featured in journals such as The Journal of Lightwave Technology. After they became the core infrastructure supporting a global Internet in the 1990s, cables emerged as occasional objects of study in other fields and have since become concerns of marine policy (Tsuchiya & Govella, 2025; Watson, 2025), telecommunications politics (Headrick, 1995), media studies (Starosielski, 2015), geography (Hugill, 1999), political science (Lehdonvirta et al., 2025), international relations (Burdette, 2021), security studies (Bueger & Liebetrau, 2021), war studies (Sechrist, 2010), and computer science (Liu et al., 2020), among others. These fields are still somewhat separate, with optics, electronics, marine, and security researchers looking at different aspects of a single infrastructure, without much cross-citation. This fragmentation is not unique to subsea cables. We can identify similar genealogical splits and patterns in other digital infrastructures, whether data centers, satellites, or broadband.
In addition to fragmented research within academia, scholarship on digital infrastructure often remains separate from knowledge practices in advocacy, industrial, and regulatory domains, though this is shifting. Advocacy organizations such as the Gates Foundation and Democracy Fund lead programs on digital public infrastructure and equitable civic infrastructure, respectively. Companies conduct extensive research related to the development of new technologies, systems, and processes. Organizations such as the Uptime Institute and TeleGeography analyze market conditions and technical developments. Individual companies use research to initiate projects, test prototypes, and substantiate patents and intellectual property claims. Research is a core part of commercial enterprise. It is also integral to many regulatory processes. For instance, digital infrastructure development may necessitate environmental impact assessments that include research by archaeologists and biologists, engineers and geologists, Indigenous leaders, and community organizations. In the process of developing digital infrastructures, commercial operators submit filings to regulatory agencies, which often append important research studies. Thus, a complex research assemblage not only shapes academic, industrial, and social understandings of digital infrastructure but also invites different ways of thinking about scholarly positionality. Following Karen Barad (2007) and Donna Haraway (1988), the digital infrastructure scholar should put different domains of knowledge into conversation while questioning their production of norms, boundaries, exclusions, and responsibilities.
Putting knowledge domains into conversation in this way is generative, but is not without tensions. Academics tend to value their own profession’s research and venues for dissemination above other kinds. Many humanities-based media scholars seek to distance themselves from industry research, shaped by the influence of political economic critique and a sense that direct industry engagement might corrupt their findings (Holt, 2013, 2024). To guard against this, scholars often imagine themselves as occupying a position beyond industry forces, categorically distinct from research conducted in digital infrastructure industries, yet digital infrastructure researchers need to engage with knowledge produced not only in academic domains but beyond them, remaining curious about and critically aware of what is known about digital infrastructure across multiple settings, and grappling with their own situatedness in this ecosystem. Our approach suggests that epistemological openness and multifaceted collaboration can productively guide digital infrastructure research.
There is a growing need for digital infrastructure researchers to engage across disciplines and with industries, but also to recognize and work with community formations on and beyond lands, in oceans and skies, formations that encompass humans and more-than-humans in milieus that are necessarily interlinked. Scholars routinely critique the exclusion of community stakeholders from the design, planning, and decommissioning of digital infrastructure (Aidinlis, 2025; Marres et al., 2025), yet this scope can be extended: Researchers might connect human communities on land with other forms of collective life, including fisherfolk, marine mammals, and oceanic species inhabiting fluidic blue environments (Han, 2024; Jue, 2020), whose movements may intersect with satellite footprints and undersea cables. In other words, a capacious kind of critical inquiry and connection is demanded during this moment of climate disruption, planetary militarization, and existential challenges brought by AI.
The Infrastructure Intermediary
Emphasizing the limits of siloed digital infrastructure research, we propose a more collaborative and integrative approach moving forward. We argue that digital infrastructure research can move beyond distanced critique to actively bridge disciplines, sectors, and fields of knowledge production. Rather than simply endorsing existing calls for interdisciplinarity within the university, we advocate leveraging it tactically to dismantle the epistemic silos that persist across academic and professional cultures. By casting the digital infrastructure researcher as an intermediary, we are naming a role that many already inhabit. Media scholars have long imagined or practiced the work of connecting different sectors, institutions, and forms of knowledge, but the field has rarely organized around this shared role.
To articulate the infrastructure intermediary position, we build on media scholarship that recognizes social subjects in the modern conjuncture as always already mediated (Althusser, 1971; Gitelman, 2006; Hall, 1980; Kember & Zylinska, 2014; Maitra, 2020). Whether mediated subjectivities are conceived as individuals and/or collectives (Lévy, 1997) or as emerging through dynamic entanglements of matter and meaning, knowledge and ethics (Barad, 2007), the contours and limits of subject positions have been shaped by the consumption, use, or nonuse of media devices and digital infrastructures. Put another way, it is not possible to separate social subjectivities from media technologies, industries, or cultures; processes of mediation have come to saturate everyday ecologies (Jue & Ruiz, 2021) and suffuse subject formation. This is not to say that subjectivities are entirely determined by media cultures. However, we cannot ignore the persistent and permeating ways that media shape—and set the limits of—consciousness, actions, and environments. Indeed, feminist technoscience and digital media scholars have implicitly approached technology users as intermediaries who are affected by intersecting axes of social power and privilege (or lack thereof) while also playing a key role in shaping how digital technologies are experienced and understood.
Social subjectivities are mediated not only by signs and screens but also by the built environment and architectures of media circulation or communicative capitalism. They take shape in relation to power grids and water systems, broadcast or satellite footprints, cable systems, cellular zones, and WiFi networks and through the territorializing power of nation-states. Being in reach, range, or service of these infrastructures enables certain types of embodied/affective relations and potentials (touching, learning, sending, sharing, etc.) and can dynamically shape and shift subjects and social relations at variable scales. People are situated at the intersections of multiple massive systems and, as such, are not simply “end users,” “terminals,” or “prosumers” (Jenkins, 2006; Virilio, 1997). Their activities can catalyze, interlink, and coordinate a splintering of infrastructures (Graham & Marvin, 2001) or layers of infrastructure (Bratton, 2016). These operations occur on the backends and are generally unintelligible to users (Parks et al., 2023), yet users sustain infrastructures with their attention, bodily energy, knowledge, and time—or their “free labor” (Andrejevic, 2012; Jarrett, 2016; Lazzarato, 2006; Terranova, 2000). Users are always already mediated, yet they also actively mediate relations in and across infrastructural systems by operating, transacting, capturing, posting, and communicating. In this way, users function as infrastructure intermediaries.
In conceptualizing this term, we have two aims. First, as mentioned above, we build on and extend existing media studies research that recognizes how social subjects emerge in media ecologies and suggest this not only involves content, screens, and ideologies, but infrastructural intra-actions as well. Second, we use the term to signal a particular digital infrastructure research framework. Being an infrastructure intermediary suggests the importance of being able to (1) identify multiple intersecting infrastructures operationalized to support mediated communication; (2) intermediate research—that is, support and (re)configure investigative relations across, among, and beyond academic disciplines; (3) intermediate the varied contexts of digital infrastructure (academic, industry, regulatory, community); and (4) intermediate engagement between those domains and diverse, situated communities.
This focus on relationality, collective understandings, and collaborative engagements resonates with participatory action research (PAR) used in sociology, public policy, and public health. Similar to PAR, infrastructure intermediaries employ a “reflective process that is directly linked to action, influenced by understanding of history, culture, and local context and embedded in social relationships . . . and lead[s] to people having increased control over their lives” (Baum et al., 2006, p. 854). This stance aligns with a long-standing scholarly tradition of feminist, decolonial, collaborative, community-oriented action research that seeks simultaneously to generate knowledge and tactically use it in contexts beyond academia (Billard & Waisbord, 2024). Traditionally, the goal of such research has been to support historically marginalized communities in domains such as health, education, technology design, and communication. However, unlike PAR, infrastructure intermediaries not only focus on empowering communities in multistakeholder processes and projects but also inform and influence stakeholders with more dominant and structuring forms of economic, political, and sociocultural power to press for environmental and social justice in digital infrastructure industries, policies, and collective knowledge. In this respect, the infrastructure intermediary also aligns with interventionist social science research that calls for scholars to act as troublemakers who probe and engage technology developers by confronting them with different perspectives through collaborative research (Ruckenstein, 2025).
Relatedly, the infrastructure intermediary pursues interventionist methods and approaches that bridge academia, technology development, and everyday life. Scholars can mobilize methods of knowledge production and circulation that do not always land neatly in the form of text and do not always produce “outputs” or “deliverables” in ways that are recognized by academic disciplines (Jungnickel, 2020; Lury & Wakeford, 2012). Universities, too, must consider these issues when evaluating the value, impact, and contributions of scholarly work. Put simply, scholars mediate diverse forces, temporalities, and spatial contexts—each demanding distinct modes of engagement—through their selection of methods, materials, and practices (Law & Urry, 2004). Developing analyses of digital infrastructures and recommendations for more just infrastructural futures is core to the infrastructure intermediary approach.
We recognize that an intermediary position is not always feasible or appropriate, nor can it consistently engage the full range of stakeholders, whether communities, governments, advocacy groups, or industry actors. In some contexts, such engagement may be difficult or even dangerous. The scope of possible action is shaped by context and by personal and political circumstances. Power relations and intersectional differences—both between scholars and industry actors and among scholars themselves—can further constrain possibilities for action and intervention. For example, strong corporate influence on institutions or unwillingness to collaborate may render an intermediary role futile. Practical considerations, such as time constraints, matter too. In some cases, researchers may ethically oppose a given infrastructure project, in which case intermediation may involve supporting those who resist its development. The intermediary position should therefore be understood as a tactical and contingent approach rather than a universal position that is always available or desirable.
In arguing for the conceptualization of the digital infrastructure researcher as an intermediary, we frame this role as a situational practice, not a prescription. Once researchers have historicized and critiqued infrastructural systems or exposed inequitable and outdated policies and regulatory frameworks, what forms of action might follow? To what extent can researchers intervene in more pointed and sustained ways? What would a meaningful transformation of these systems entail, particularly in addressing their uneven impacts? These questions have consistently animated our own work. In the following section, we outline several dimensions of digital infrastructure research, emphasizing the intermediary role researchers can play in shaping more equitable technological futures.
Dimensions of Digital Infrastructure Research
Dimensionality involves filling in or fleshing out an object of inquiry by specifying its volumes, forces, and potentials. Attending to dimensionality challenges narratives that claim digital infrastructures flatten the world by democratizing socioeconomic relations. Drawing on our collective reflections across diverse domains, technologies, historical periods, and geographic contexts, we sketch five dimensions of digital infrastructure research: integrative collaboration, time, space, industry, and regulation. Together, these dimensions help define the role of the infrastructure intermediary and foster a more intra-active approach to the study of digital infrastructure.
First, digital infrastructure research can start from an integrative and collaborative position. Digital infrastructure’s complexity exceeds the understanding of any single domain, practitioner, or researcher. Knowledge development in this field is characterized by profound epistemic heterogeneity, even across various engineering disciplines. In addition, beyond the domain of research, designers, installers, regulators, and users all possess distinct forms of knowledge and experience of digital infrastructure. The resulting fragmentation of knowledge about digital infrastructure in academia, across disciplines, and among various publics poses significant challenges. Without an integrative and collaborative research orientation, diverse needs, motivations, and experiences that shape digital infrastructure’s design, governance, and use are often obscured.
Digital infrastructure research would benefit from integrative collaboration across domains—not as a totalizing project, but as a tactical principle for navigating complexity and fostering shared knowledges, whether through cross-citation, consultations, or other forms of engagement. Without a comprehensive understanding of infrastructural systems and their interdependencies, engineers cannot design socially responsive or sustainable systems, humanities or social sciences scholars cannot grasp the material complexity of their object of study, and publics lack pathways for meaningful policy advocacy. As digital infrastructures undergird more aspects of daily life, it becomes crucial to form integrated understandings of what they are, how they are designed, and how they can be shaped collectively.
Second, attention to the various temporalities of digital infrastructure, from their deep histories to their speculative futures, expands the possibilities for collaboration and integration and proliferates sites where an intermediary position could be impactful. As digital infrastructure researchers, we imagine infrastructure as dynamic assemblages that move through distinct temporal phases from design to decay. Industry actors continually build, upgrade, repurpose, and dismantle cables, data centers, satellites, and cell towers across geographic and political contexts. Entire networks are routinely placed on timelines of planned decommissioning—copper-based communication networks, 2G and 3G systems, for instance, have been formally designated as end-of-life technologies. Abandoned, disused, or “obsolete” infrastructures might also be reactivated or reimagined (Parks & Velkova, 2026). For example, dark fiber networks laid during the 1990s broadband boom have been repurposed for a range of contemporary uses, some of which extend beyond telecommunications to sensing.
Understanding an infrastructure’s full life cycle—emergence, maintenance, and decommissioning—requires ongoing collaboration across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities and with policy makers, communities, and industry practitioners. Focusing on the cyclical and uneven temporalities of systems can also open new research topics and methodologies in digital infrastructure research. For instance, it might enable infrastructure intermediaries to make legible how temporal regimes of innovation, obsolescence, and endurance structure participation in and exclusion from infrastructural systems. Site-specific investigations and collaborations can reveal how certain actors are positioned in or left out of dominant infrastructural systems and chronologies (Parks & Velkova, 2026; Velkova & Plantin, 2023).
Third, rethinking the spatial dimensions of digital infrastructure research can expand possibilities for integrative collaboration and intermediary work. Attending to the process of site selection, as it is known in the industry, requires knowledge about landscape topography and spectrum allocation. This process relies not only on databases that identify specific areas as appropriate for transformation into digital infrastructure sites but can also involve engagement with marketing materials and discourse about the locations (Johnson, 2019). Some organizations and commercial entities have attempted to formalize and privatize this process (Infrastructure Masons, 2025; Resilient Infrastructure Networks Lab, 2025; Site Selection Group, 2025).
Property ownership issues and signal propagation, as well as state regulations and topography, determine where a cell tower, data center, fiber-optic network, or subsea landing can be located. Scholars have pointed out many factors affecting siting, including community contestations, preexisting infrastructures, and political struggles and historical formations of infrastructure systems (Greene, 2022; Larkin, 2013; Star, 1999). For the most part, however, the regulatory practice and process of siting, and the local tensions they can provoke, fall outside much of the academic research on digital infrastructure. We suggest such research could prove valuable to communities grappling with siting questions, conflicts, or controversies, as well as those that may face them in the future (Baudry, 2021; Fang & Greenstein, 2025).
Specific siting controversies can further elucidate issues described above. For instance, when Vertical Bridge, LLC proposed a cell tower installation in Lake County, Montana, in 2023, next to the Paradise Pines trailer park community, residents quickly realized what was at stake. They protested the project on multiple grounds that extended well beyond typical “not in my backyard” responses. In addition to concerns about the loud whir of electricity and fans, flashing bright lights, and a 160-foot faux tree tower looming above their trailers, community members cited federal laws like the National Environmental Protection Act and the Migratory Birds Act because of potential harm to local wildlife, including ospreys and eagles. Because the proposed tower site was on privately owned land in the Flathead Indian Reservation, the group also consulted a tribal lawyer to understand the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes’ position. In addition, community members reviewed existing wireless coverage maps, as well as floodplain and cultural resource data, and sought legal advice from pro bono attorneys’ offices. In short, the proposed installation galvanized a grassroots effort that built local knowledge about cellular infrastructure and ultimately led to the tower’s relocation. Such cases draw attention to broader questions about whether and why a digital infrastructure installation is needed or warranted, who determines its placement, which public review processes exist, and how stakeholders negotiate fair outcomes.
Siting controversies can also expose the general opacity of infrastructure. Once infrastructure is in place, the channels for modification or redress are often limited and unclear. Industry actors may be well-versed in siting logistics, leasing, and rights of way, yet they frequently lack insight into the broader social and environmental consequences of their projects and the communities into which those projects are embedded. Few, moreover, have developed meaningful ways to involve publics early, ensure accountability, or sustain participation as projects evolve. Developers often move at a pace poorly matched to community consultation. Legal avenues for opposition are similarly narrow: In the United States, federal legislation like the Telecommunications Act of 1996 frequently overrides local ordinances and curtails community input. Collaborating with community groups to help integrate and contextualize infrastructure systems thus represents an important avenue for intermediary work.
Fourth, in digital infrastructure research, it is critical to recognize that “the industry” means people. Often, media studies researchers collapse “the industry” into a singular, monolithic entity. Critical theorists influenced by Marxist and late-Marxist traditions (including some of us) approach “the industry” as an extractive and exploitative force that organizes relations of production and labor hierarchies in the service of capital accumulation (Fuchs & Mosco, 2015; McChesney, 2000; Wasko, 2014). Although political economists and media industry scholars have productively examined particular industrial, labor, and policy conditions (Caldwell, 2008; Holt & Perren, 2019; McChesney, 2000; Schiller, 1989), analyses of telecommunications and digital infrastructure companies frequently subsume them within the sprawling category of big tech or digital capitalism, presumed to operate under shared logics of extraction and exploitation. While this critique remains indispensable, it has also tended to approach “the industry” as an undifferentiated apparatus of domination. Just as “community” does not refer to a uniform entity, “industry” encompasses a diverse constellation of actors, institutions, and epistemic cultures.
Digital infrastructure industries are, at their core, composed of people—individuals whose professional practices and worldviews are shaped by distinct positionalities, disciplinary training, and institutional constraints. To assert that “industry is people” is to call for systematic attention to the conversations, negotiations, and labor cultures in digital infrastructure industries, research that is markedly underdeveloped in the humanities and social sciences (Bojczuk et al., 2024; Plantin, 2021; Posada, 2026). Scholars too often assume that workers passively align with corporate owners or that corporate owners align with each other; clearly, this is not always the case. This may be especially true in digital infrastructure industries where several industrial players coordinate to produce objects and networks in different global contexts. For example, laying any fiber-optic cable involves industry professionals who produce the ducts, bend glass, dig holes, lay fiber, install endpoints, turn these cables on, and maintain their activity. Each of these objects and processes may be owned and operated by separate companies and involve various sectors and types of labor.
Industry professionals articulate a wide range of perspectives about the infrastructures they design, maintain, and govern. Growing movements among digital infrastructure operators to address sustainability challenges signal divergent commitments, as do recurrent employee protests at Google concerning the company’s geopolitical entanglements. “The people” who constitute the industry thus navigate conflicting logics and values in their everyday practices. Their labor not only enables but actively reshapes the designs and operation of digital infrastructures. Far from functioning as mere cogs within extractive machines, they are constitutive agents in the ongoing production and transformation of the digital environment.
All these dimensions—the need for integrative collaboration, expanded attention to temporality and spatiality, and close engagement with cultures and people in industrial contexts—are being intensified by the scale and changing configurations of emerging digital infrastructures. The enormous energy demands of hyperscale data centers, for example, necessitate complex coordination among utility providers, regulators, and environmental planners to secure unprecedented quantities of power, water, and land. In turn, this coordination influences power plant siting, alters hydrological systems, and reshapes community access to shared environmental resources (Bojczuk, 2025; Valdivia, 2024; Velkova, 2026). Similar resource demands exist for other digital infrastructure industries, whether they are launching massive constellations of nanosats into orbit or installing small 5G cells on the ground. Moreover, these infrastructures do not exist in isolation, but interact, compete, and interfere with one another; wind farms can disrupt cell phone reception and data traffic, while the spatial and ecological footprint of data centers can generate cascading land-use conflicts across regions. Issues of siting can also ignite broader debates on sovereignty.
Suffice it to say that addressing such interdependencies exceeds the capacity of any single discipline, sector, or regulatory framework—a fact increasingly acknowledged even in the data center industry itself (Arslanauk, 2025). For scholars, this recognition demands an ongoing reflexivity about the assumptions that define the scope and scale of digital infrastructure problems. The expertise of others—across fields, industries, and communities—is not supplementary, but essential to understanding and governing these complex sociotechnical systems, which are often more multivalent and mystifying than assumed.
Finally, among these areas of collaboration and integration, digital infrastructure research can engage with law and policy. Regulatory domains are inconsistent and extend far beyond national, state, or local jurisdictions; sovereign territories and infrastructural footprints rarely coincide (Holt, 2024; Parks, 2005; Sargsyan, 2016). Underserved communities, including rural and Indigenous groups in the United States and Canada, sometimes identify loopholes or create adaptive workarounds within federal policy frameworks that better suit local conditions and values (Duarte, 2017; McMahon, 2014). For instance, some tribal communities have pursued the construction of dark fiber networks to establish private-tribe partnerships that provide broadband access on and near reservations. In these cases, open-access dark fiber builds function as both infrastructural and temporal interventions, circumventing unrealistic and outdated federal legislation related to infrastructure funding and development on sovereign tribal lands.
Furthermore, what is legal is not always equitable or ethical and may diminish both private and public benefits. Scholars have an important role to play in identifying and analyzing the conditions under which legally permissible infrastructural practices reproduce social inequities or ethical failures. Scholars have drawn attention to the corporate strategies and politics that shape digital infrastructures, the labor practices and regulatory vacuums that sustain them, and the frictions between telecommunications and infrastructure policy and the lived experiences of those affected by them. Such research gestures toward a mode of digital infrastructure inquiry grounded in attentive and participatory engagement, one that prioritizes practices of listening (Srinivasan, 2017), sharing, understanding, and building “collective wisdom” (Cizek & Uricchio, 2019).
In practice, digital infrastructure researchers’ intermediary work can take multiple forms: They have collaborated with community organizations; met with CEOs of companies; listened to city council meetings; attended trade conferences; conducted site visits; created and analyzed maps and blueprints; and worked across local, national, and transnational contexts. Through such research activity, they have sought to articulate and amplify critical and public interest perspectives in infrastructural domains. Our point here is that the researcher’s role is not limited to documenting or interpreting diverse stakeholder positions, but also involves intermediation—helping distinct actors and institutions become more legible to one another. This mediating function does not reduce the researcher’s responsibility to historicize, interrogate, and critique; rather, it deepens it. By facilitating communication and translation across industrial, academic, and civic contexts, scholars can enrich how knowledge about digital infrastructures is produced and circulated and create new possibilities for public intervention in their formation and operation.
Table 1. A Partial Inventory of Digital Infrastructure Research Interventions.
|
Historical Research |
|
|
Observation, Documentation, and Analysis |
|
|
Industry Inquiry and Analysis |
|
|
Governance and Policy Analysis |
|
|
Design, Forecasting, and Frameworks |
|
|
Public Engagement and Communication |
|
Conclusion
The infrastructure intermediary framework aims to foster dialogue and diffract knowledge across domains that are often treated as discrete: technology, industry, community, and regulation. The goal of the approach is to create conditions for blended expertise and develop a repertoire of actions and interventions available to researchers. Toward that end, we propose a partial inventory of digital infrastructure research interventions (see Table 1) that can operate at multiple scales and involve diverse actors. The inventory derives from our own long-standing research of distinct sites, infrastructure objects, and sectors. We think across specializations and fields to articulate shared, persistent concerns where an intermediary approach could be useful. This inventory is an accumulation of ideas based on our collective research experience and knowledge. We hope it helps to cultivate a shared conceptual vocabulary for articulating lived experiences of infrastructures; recognizing varied and overlapping forms of infrastructural knowledge; and examining how promises, harms, and everyday infrastructure dependencies are experienced and expressed from multiple times/spaces and perspectives.
Through such research and interventions, scholars can facilitate knowledge flows and relationships among industry actors, government agencies, and communities—strengthening the connective tissue between these domains. These flows will always happen in a space fraught with power and friction. It will always be an encounter of multiple positionalities and logics. What will stick in encounters across difference, as Anna Tsing (2005) suggests, is what comes to make a difference. We hope these interventions will generate encounters that not only contribute to improved infrastructural design and governance but also help mitigate conflict, reduce costly legal disputes, and enhance the equitable siting and use of digital infrastructures. Ultimately, this infrastructure intermediary framework underscores the generative potential of public-facing humanities and social sciences scholarship to open new channels of communication, redistribute expertise, and expand possibilities for more just and sustainable infrastructural futures.
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