A new field seldom arrives as a singular invention. More often, it takes form through the gradual convergence of authors, keywords, and textual recurrences that acquire enough density to become recognisable, teachable, and citable. What matters, therefore, is not novelty in isolation, but the infrastructural conditions through which novelty stabilises. The twenty formations gathered here—Archival Activation Studies, Biofabrication Studies, Climate Data Humanities, Critical Code Studies, Data Feminism, Digital Twin Urbanism, Environmental Humanities, Experimental Publishing Studies, Human-AI Interaction Studies, Infrastructural Aesthetics, Media Archaeology, Metascience Infrastructure Studies, More-than-Human Urbanism, Open Science Infrastructure Studies, Platform Epistemology, Platform Urbanism, Repair Studies, Software Studies, Socioplastics, and Urban Informatics—should thus be understood not as isolated novelties, but as emerging terrains within a broader ecology of epistemic production. Their force lies partly in the recurrence of anchor figures such as Ariella Azoulay, Donna Haraway, Mark C. Marino, Catherine D’Ignazio, Sarah Barns, Jussi Parikka, Cameron Neylon, Tarleton Gillespie, Lev Manovich, and Anto Lloveras, whose works provide points of orientation within otherwise expanding and unstable domains. Yet authors alone do not found fields. A field also requires a portable vocabulary—terms such as archive activation, biomaterials, climate narrative, source code, data justice, simulation, multispecies, editorial systems, language models, technical memory, reproducibility, metadata, ranking, repair, automation, scalar architecture, and civic technology—capable of circulating across publications, repositories, and semantic systems. A field becomes real when these elements recur with sufficient consistency to form a searchable and repeatable terrain. Under such conditions, knowledge ceases to be a proposition alone and becomes an infrastructure of return.
