The Infrastructural Age is a framework for understanding how the infrastructures of knowledge shape the conditions under which knowledge becomes possible, visible, and authoritative.
Databases, platforms, evaluation systems, AI systems embedded in knowledge production, institutions, and standards are not neutral supports for knowledge. They organize the environments in which knowledge is produced, recognized, circulated, and used.
An international research initiative founded by Márton Demeter.
Knowledge is produced within systems that organize visibility, access, evaluation, authority, and circulation. Databases, platforms, standards, institutions, and AI systems embedded in knowledge production influence which forms of knowledge can be produced, recognized, compared, and shared across contexts.
These infrastructures are neither uniform nor universal. They differ across societies, institutions, disciplines, and technological environments. The Infrastructural Age examines what these differences mean for knowledge—and ultimately for science, communication, and human agency.
The project advances an Infrastructure-based Theory of Science to examine how scientific infrastructures organize visibility, authority, epistemic processes, and claims to universality. It treats databases, evaluation systems, publication platforms, research institutions, standards, and AI systems embedded in scientific work as constitutive elements of scientific organization.
Current research focuses on global science, research evaluation, generative AI, and the emergence of alternative knowledge infrastructures, with particular attention to China. These cases make it possible to study how different infrastructural arrangements shape the production, validation, and circulation of scientific knowledge.
This section follows ideas while they are still developing, connecting specialized research with broader questions about how we know, communicate, and act within infrastructural environments.
Researchers from different disciplines, regions, and methodological traditions contribute to its questions through joint research, publications, workshops, and scholarly exchange.
Márton Demeter works on the infrastructures that shape global knowledge production, scientific authority, research evaluation, and artificial intelligence. His research connects science studies, communication, and the study of global knowledge inequalities, with particular attention to alternative knowledge infrastructures and China.
He is the author of Academic Knowledge Production and the Global South: Questioning Inequality and Under-Representation and the forthcoming The Sino-Epistemic Turn: China’s Knowledge Sovereignty in the GenAI Era.
Examines how structural inequalities shape the global organization of academic knowledge production, scientific visibility, and recognition.
Examines China’s emerging knowledge sovereignty through research policy, scientific publishing, research evaluation, data infrastructures, and AI governance.
Develops a world-systems perspective on global scientific inequality and the structural organization of scientific visibility and recognition.
Shows how different bibliographic infrastructures produce different patterns of scientific visibility, citation, and research evaluation.
Examines how AI and differentiated scientific infrastructures may contribute to distinct trajectories within global science.
Examines how generative AI becomes embedded across the scientific knowledge-production pipeline, from discovery and analysis to writing, evaluation, and dissemination.