2026-05-22T12:44:03Zhttps://keep.lib.asu.edu/oai/request

oai:keep.lib.asu.edu:node-2023672025-08-18T22:22:09Zoai_pmh:alloai_pmh:repo_items

202367 https://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.2.N.202367 http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ All Rights Reserved 2025 177 pages Doctoral Dissertation Academic theses en Gansky, Ben Smith, Lindsay A Hong, Sun-ha Guston, David Pine, Katie Arizona State University Partial requirement for: Ph.D., Arizona State University, 2025 Field of study: Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology This dissertation examines how public interest collectives adopt, adapt, and contest digital technologies in ways that reflect and reshape their normative commitments. Drawing on three case studies, I show that the attempt to apply values such as democracy, privacy, and accountability to technical systems often reveals these values’ ambiguity, opening them up to contestation and negotiation within and across collectives. Rather than serving as stable foundations for decision-making, these values become sites of political struggle, redefinition, and infrastructural experimentation. The first case analyzes archival records from the 1968 “Social Data File,” a data initiative led by civil rights pioneer Wiley A. Branton in Washington, D.C. Branton strategically framed citizen data as property to situate it within the protective boundaries of trust law, sidestepping the uncertainties of emerging privacy law. The second case examines two years of correspondence between Portland-area transit planners and the tech firm Replica, revealing how conflicts over the opacity of AI training data expose the downstream political consequences of inherited dependencies. The final case focuses on Decidim, an open-source democracy software project in Barcelona, where founders attempt to embed participatory values into collaborative work practices—facing resistance from members who interpret those same values differently. Across these sites, I develop the concept of dependency craftwork to describe how actors actively reshape the social, legal, and technical dependencies that define their digital infrastructures. Dependencies, rather than being eliminated or passively inherited, are sites of situated intervention and value contestation. This research contributes to science and technology studies, infrastructure studies, and digital political economy by showing how normative values are enacted through the active reworking of infrastructural dependencies. Rather than seeking to eliminate dependency, public interest actors engage in the craftwork of transforming dependencies into more just and accountable interdependencies. The findings offer a framework for understanding how the practice of digital infrastructure governance can open possibilities for nurturing relations of reciprocity and interdependence within and across social worlds working towards more just and inclusive futures. Cultural Anthropology Information Technology Political Science digital STS Ethics human-computer interaction IT Politics public interest organizations Dependency Craftwork: Governing Digital Tools in Public Interest Collectives