Infrastructural Inversion

A methodological move, articulated by Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, that foregrounds the usually invisible infrastructure underpinning everyday action — categories, standards, procedures, silent stabilising work — treating it as the primary object of analysis rather than as taken-for-granted background. Breakdowns and exclusions are understood as moments of infrastructural inversion because they make visible whose needs the infrastructure was designed around. Accessibility research uses infrastructural inversion to expose the exclusionary politics encoded in classification systems (e.g., who counts as "disabled enough" for accommodation).