The Social Life of XG – Digital infrastructures and the reconfiguration of sovereignty and imagined communities

Abstract

In the context of an expansion of digital infrastructures driven by the impact and recovery of the pandemic, we bring together perspectives from queer feminist technoscience, migration and cultural studies, social and political theory, from the EU and the UK, in order to investigate how infrastructural imaginaries (re)configure democratic sovereignty, imagined communities, and practices of bordering of the European Union. We propose to think and investigate sovereignty through (a) infrastructural and entrepreneurial ways of constituting and imagining e?thnos and demos through technological innovations, and (b) conflicts that emerge where efforts to create new infrastructures meet existing ones. Is it possible, we ask, that new constitutionalities are being imagined, practiced, and produced here?

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Description

Following conflicts and challenges arising around the implementation of digital infrastructures, we will draw on a mixed-method approach including participatory observations and field notes, minutes of informal conversations, and on-site interviews, as well as netnography, document analyses and expert interviews to conduct fieldwork witt actors fund, conceptualize (i.e. legally/academic/think tanks) and implement digital transformation and local environments where infrastructural imaginaries play out in everyday negotiations, reconfigurations and conflicts. By studying how the central concepts of the study develop in imaginaries tied to digital infrastructures, the project highlights the role of these infrastructures and actors in the formation of community imaginaries, reconfigurations of sovereignty, éthnos and demos. The project innovates by integrating trans-disciplinary methods, advancing critical knowledge amongst actors of operational practices and by collaborating with NGOs and artistic projects concerned with the socio-cultural effects of new digital infrastructures.

To understand the complex ways in which infrastructural imaginaries (re)configure notions of sovereignty and imagined communities, we proceed in three phases of research that put political science, sociology, technocultural studies and cultural anthropology in conversation with one another.

Phase 1 of our research project constructs a solid conceptual framework based on (a) thorough and extensive literature reviews and (b) a description and assessment of the recovery plans (RRF/NGEU and BBB) that constitute the institutional and policy frames for our topic of research. Together, the results from phase 1 constitute the conceptual and empirical base for the following research phases.

Phase 2 of our research concerns the infrastructural imaginaries harboured by the actors that develop and implement digital transformations connected to the quest for digital sovereignty in the EU and UK. We will inquire a) how these actors come to understand, legitimize and frame the infrastructural projects they are contributing to, b) how these actors envision their contribution to sovereignty in a multilateral situation where national and transnational, local, regional and global relations are rearranged c) how these actors conceive of access and exclusion to their infrastructures and imagine its users, and d) where they perceive challenges and conflicts in the implementation of their concepts.

Phase 3 investigates local environments where infrastructural imaginaries play out in everyday negotiations, reconfigurations and conflicts that emerge when efforts to create new infrastructures meet existing ones. The concrete locations of these negotiations are difficult to anticipate, and their identification will rely on expert interviews and material gathered in phase 2, as well as the continuous dialogue with cooperation partners and their networks. Drawing on these resources, we will identify two field sites in each of the four countries. We do expect these environments to be linked to neighbourhoods, workplaces, and health services which constitute crucial areas impacted by digital technologies. They can include municipalities implementing cellular towers, optics fibre or entire smart neighbourhoods, workplaces introducing digital technologies, health providers launching tracking apps or remote health services. Movements protesting 5G expansion, conflicts regarding contact tracing apps or mobilizations against highly automated “gigafactories” point towards a breadth of possible research environments, that either serve as testing grounds for new infrastructures, or provide the terrain on which they fall into conflict with existing ones and necessitate adaption. This research phase will highlight a) how existing infrastructures produce friction with new ones b) how conflicts arise and are understood by participants c) which actors are mobilized and become involved as stakeholders and d) what (alternative) imaginations of community are circulated and practiced.