Zarine Kharazian

@zarine.net

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phd candidate @cip.uw.edu, @communitydata.science, & @hcde.uw.edu. I study how to govern public knowledge institutions under attack. zarine.net

Paper abstract says: Abstract: From organized disinformation campaigns on social media to politically motivated attempts to take over publishers and platforms, the last decade has seen a proliferation of attacks on the epistemic infrastructure that people rely on to understand the world. We argue that scholars, practitioners, and policymakers have struggled to respond effectively to these threats in part because they lack systematic ways to understand the shifting nature of what is under threat and how it is being attacked. Drawing on Elinor Ostrom's classic work on commons governance, we develop a conceptual framework that conceptualizes epis-temic infrastructure as a shared resource system whose three interdependent components— knowledge, governance, and legitimacy —can each be attacked independently by motivated actors through two distinct modes: capture and destruction. Applied to recent attacks on Wikipedia, public broadcasters, and government data agencies, the framework reveals how attacks frequently target governance structures and institutional legitimacy rather than the knowledge outputs and information flows that existing approaches focus on, with implications for how scholars and practitioners diagnose and respond to these threats.

Poster for show at Hidden Hall, a venue in Seattle's Fremont neighborhood, showing doors at 7 and music at 7:30.