Annalisa Pelizza

Annalisa Pelizza is Associate Professor at Twente University (NL) in the department of Science, Technology and Policy Studies (STePS). She specializes in governance by information infrastructures, especially affecting modernist institutions.

Between 2017 and 2022 she will be the Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded project “Processing Citizenship: Digital registration of migrants as co-production of citizens, territory and Europe”, which will extend her “Vectorial Glance” framework (Pelizza 2016) to the analysis of the trans-governmental European information infrastructure for migrant registration.

Annalisa Pelizza has been awarded the Best Paper Prize at WikiSym, an Award of Distinction at Ars Electronica and other academic recognitions. Annalisa’s research has been granted funding under the EU Excellence in Science pillar, both under FP7 and Horizon2020. She is involved as editorial board member and reviewer in various science, technology and humanities journals.

Annalisa holds a master in Media and Communication Sciences from the University of Bologna, and a PhD in Information Society from the University of Milan-Bicocca. She has also worked as project leader and ethnographer of large-scale governmental/industry information infrastructures. She was one of the founders of the Telestreet network of community broadcasters.

Research interests

Governance by information infrastructures; performativity of data circulation under an STS perspective; computational methods; interactive digital art, especially in urban environments; Actor-Network Theory and semiotics as research methodologies.

Research project

Processing Governance. Co-production of citizens, territory and institutions

“Governance by technology / by design”, “politics of technology”: similar conceptualizations constitute attempts to describe regimes of inclusion/exclusion and processes of subjectification “nested” in technical infrastructures.
After the mass diffusion of the Internet, communication sciences have begun to conceive of information infrastructures as governance artefacts, a privileged locus to investigate the material embeddedness of political arrangements.
The Modernist nation-state is deeply affected by processes of governance shifting from parliamentary hemicycles to algorithms, from ministerial corridors to protocols. State bureaucracy is the most complex socio-technical machine that Modernity has built in order to handle information. As such, it itself develops and adopts information infrastructures as governance artefacts.
Similar artefacts may trigger new capabilities that – while initially appearing as micro-technical changes – over time might pave the ground for macro-changes in the order of governance. An algorithm that gives access to welfare resources to a given class of individuals while it prevents other classes, for example, over time might stabilize into a new policy that de facto questions the universality principle proper to the Modernist nation-state. What is technologically built, over time could come to be conceived as a natural given.
First step in a broader project, the stay at the Paris IAS aims at developing a theoretical and methodological framework combining globalization and border studies and surveillance studies in IT and migration with a materialist performative approach derived from science and technology studies and media geography.