Over the course of two afternoons, these workshops will discuss the ongoing impact of platformization on practices, materialities, and normativities of knowledge. We will explore how the production, circulation, use, and cultural status of knowledge are evolving in response to the reconfiguration of data-oriented epistemic infrastructures. Most prominently, social media platforms re-arrange computational resources and user engagement, data and interfaces, social organizations, and machine learning. This results in new modes and regimes of knowledge production across different social and cultural sectors. Starting from the assumption that epistemic infrastructures always emerge from the interplay between materialities and communities of practice, we aim to compare a diverse array of knowledge practices and their transformations: from journalism and science, to influencers and fans, from climate crisis to popular culture.

While all of them undergo similar transformation, the resulting knowledge practices are heterogeneous: they each arrange images and data, organizational, and technical resources, authority and accountability in unique ways; and they all create particular forms of authorizing, debating and (de-)legitimizing expertise and other knowledge hierarchies. Often, epistemic communities have paradoxical relationships with platformization: on the one hand, innovative knowledge emerges through their affordances; on the other hand, the growing dependence on Big Techs triggers resistance and the quest for alternative infrastructures. Next to conceptual and empirical questions, the workshops will also raise methodological issues: What is the role of digital methods, of computer vision models and data visualization, of (online) ethnography, of textual and discourse analysis for a critical analysis of the epistemic infrastructures’ sociotechnical and cross-platform dynamics?

The workshops results from a cooperation of Utrecht University (Donya Alinejad and Judith Keilbach) and the University of Amsterdam (Markus Stauff) with a research project co-organized by three Brazilian universities – Federal University of Minas Gerais/UFMG (Carlos d’Andréa), Universidade do Estado da Bahia/UNEB (Elias Bitencourt), Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais/Puc Minas (Verônica Soares da Costa) – and funded by the Brazilian research fund MCTI/CNPq.

Part 1: Monday, 26 January 2026: 14-18:30
University Utrecht, Wittevrouwenstraat 7bis, room 0.03

14:15-15:30

1. Rianne Riemens (Utrecht University):  Big Tech’s Climate Futures: How Green AI, Energy and Carbon Myths Shape Climate Debates
2. Donya Alinejad (Utrecht University): Mediated Science: Expanding How We Study Social Media’s Influence on Climate Disinformation

15:45-17:00

1. Verônica Costa (PUC Minas) and Luana Cruz (INCT-CPCT): Science as a Speculative Asset: Platforms, Influence, and Informational Knowledge in the Petrobras case
2. Brogan Latil (UvA): Build It and They Will Come: Community Notes and "the wisdom of the crowd" on X

17:15:18:30

1. Carlos d’Andréa (UFMG): Articulating an Epistemic Infrastructure for Journalism: Google News Initiative’s Startups Lab in Brazil
2. Agustin Ferrari Braun / Corinne Cath (UvA): Clouded Judgements. Problematizing Cloud Infrastructures for News Media Companies

Part 2: Thursday, 29 January 2026, 14–18:00 (Amsterdam)
University of Amsterdam, Turfdraagsterpad 9, Building BG1, Room 0.16

14:15-15:30

1. Bernhard Rieder (UvA): From Ranking to Rendering. General-Purpose AI and the Rise of Synthetic Epistemic Infrastructures
2. Elias Bitencourt (UNEB): When Images Become Method: Datafication of Visuality as an Epistemic Infrastructure in Social Media Platforms

15:45-17:00

1. Natália Dias (UFMG/UvA): Visualizing Epistemic Infrastructures: Visual Methodologies for Platformized Fan Communities
2. Jan Teurlings (UvA): The Dashboard: Between Online Positivism and Informed Speculation

17:15–18:00

1. Justus Uitermark (UvA): Presentation and Discussion of “Seeing Like a Platform”

For online participation please register here.

For offline participation at Utrecht (26 January 2026) please register with: d.alinejad@uu.nl

For offline participation at Amsterdam (29 January), please register with: m.stauff@uva.nl