New Working Paper: Africa-as-a-service: Digital Health and the Rise of Drone Infrastructures

In this working paper, we draw on the case of experimental drone uses in African healthcare systems in order to explore how digital innovation stimulates critical changes in infrastructural provision and the ways in which the global role of places such as Silicon Valley, Rwanda, and Ghana, as well as their connections, are configured in processes of spatial formatting. Developing the idea of “infrastructure-as-service” as a sociological concept, we suggest that data extractivism and fantasies of infrastructural leap-frogging are major forces behind emergent fields of infrastructural experimentality and their spatial embeddedness. Revisiting dominant theories of infrastructure, the working paper scrutinizes the promises of digital infrastructures, sheds light on the specific ways in which regions in the Global South participate in, and offer indispensable services for, infrastructural changes, and theorizes the nexus of infrastructures and spatial formats.