The digital writing of human rights narratives: Failure, recognition, and the unruly inscriptions of database infrastructures

Abstract

Drawing on empirical research, this article explores the possible sociopolitical effects of database infrastructures on the shaping and construction of human rights narratives. While it has become commonplace to theorise human rights through the lens of narrative, academic debates have largely ignored the technical infrastructures through which human rights narratives are constructed. The article responds to this gap by deploying and developing theoretical tools from software and infrastructure studies to consider database infrastructures as complex sociotechnical devices that engender sociopolitical consequences for narrative possibilities. Focusing on two key examples drawn from the empirical research, the article demonstrates the necessity of developing a critical attentiveness to the ways that human rights narratives are shaped by digital infrastructure. In doing so, the article develops and complicates infrastructure and software studies approaches whilst also demonstrating their value for other fields of research which do not ordinarily come within their purview.