During the last two decades, media practices have become recognizable as practices of cooperation in discourses around digital participation and digital cultures, social media, and the dissolution of boundaries between production, distribution, and reception. These diagnoses of the present that concentrate on digital media only make obvious what is in fact valid for all media. Starting point for the Collaborative Research Center 1187 “Media of Cooperation” thus is the recognition that all media are cooperatively produced conditions of cooperation. Media practices and techniques emerge out of the reciprocal production and provision of common goals, means, and procedures. The Collaborative Research Center prefers a perspective and logic of “cooperation without consensus” (Susan Leigh Star) to an a priori orientation toward consensus. The latter bias is meant to be circumvented but consensus can nevertheless still be an objective of cooperative media practices.

The first annual conference of the Collaborative Research Center 1187 “Media of Cooperation” addresses the crossing over of two overarching research perspectives on cooperative media practices: Infrastructures and their publics on the one hand and publics and their infrastructures on the other. The conference scrutinizes publics and infrastructures not separately but in their constitutive interrelations, which allow publics and infrastructures to come into being in the first place.

The conference takes a praxeological approach, discussing historical and current processes of cooperative media practices as infrastructuring and making public(s). It involves a wide range of disciplines including Anthropology, Media Studies, History, Social Sciences, and Informatics. The conference assembles national and international experts who contribute to research and theories on ‘analog’ and ‘digital’ forms of the production and design of different publics and infrastructures. Media Studies understood in this broad way builds on concepts of networked issue publics or societies (Noortje Marres) and experimental publics and cooperative thought (Paul Kockelman). It opens up new perspectives on publics and their media infrastructures.