Infrastructures of survival: digital justice and black poetics in community Internet provision

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2018This dissertation explores community wireless networks as they respond to overlapping forms of socio-spatial inequality, using a case study of the Equitable Internet Initiative in Detroit, Michigan. Where commercial Internet service is unavailable or inaccessible to the majority of Detroit’s low-income residents, community technologists and organizers are building their own last-mile Internet infrastructure. Using data from interviews, participant observation, and organizational documents, I trace how these actors build neighborhood-scale, community-owned wireless networks and rework both the material and social relations that comprise broadband provision. Rather than analyze practices of community provision as an example of neoliberal responsibilization, I draw on black geographies, digital geographies, and infrastructure studies to analyze the networks as socio-technical survival programs, rooted in traditions of black and brown liberation. I argue that community wireless networks challenge mainstream socio-technical futuring practices and reshape the urban political struggles that take place around and through digital technologies. This dissertation fills empirical gaps in geographic research on digital infrastructures and makes theoretical contributions to contemporary urban geography, digital geographies, and black geographies. My analytical strategy of reading for difference in the socio-spatial practices of urban residents whose perspectives are illegible to the dominant political economic order enables me to advance urban geographic research on the political potential of community resilience. Theorizing community networking initiatives as infrastructural survival programs allows for a deeper and more nuanced analysis of the socio-technical practices of these efforts and helps move debates about digital inequality beyond binary “digital divides.” Finally, I contribute to black geographic scholarship by bringing it into conversation with digital geographies and helping expand its methodological repertoire