Digital sovereignty -- the idea that states should “reaffirm” their authority over the Internet and protect their citizens, institutions, and businesses from the multiple challenges to their nation’s self-determination in the digital sphere -- is understood primarily as a legal concept and a set of political discourses. As a consequence, it is predominantly analysed by political science, international relations and international law. However, the study of digital sovereignty as a set of infrastructures and socio-material practices has been comparatively neglected. This talk will examine how the concept of (digital) sovereignty can be studied via the infrastructure-embedded “situated practices” of various political and economic projects which aim to establish autonomous digital infrastructures in a hyperconnected world. I will briefly focus here on the “pilot case” of Russia, which is the subject of an ongoing research project co-led by the speaker and funded by the French National Agency for Research, ResisTIC (Criticism and circumvention of digital borders in Russia).
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Programme
15:00-15:05 : Welcome and introduction by Orsolya Gulyás & Clément Perarnaud
15:05-15:25 : Presentation by Francesca Musiani
15:25-15:35: Discussion by Jamal Shahin
15:35-16:00: Q&A with the audience
Speaker
Francesca Musiani (PhD, socio-economics of innovation, MINES ParisTech, 2012), is associate research professor at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) since 2014. She is Deputy Director of the Center for Internet and Society of CNRS, which she co-founded in 2019. She is also an associate researcher at the Center for the sociology of innovation (i3/MINES ParisTech) and a Global Fellow at the Internet Governance Lab, American University in Washington, DC. Francesca’s research work focuses on Internet governance, in an interdisciplinary perspective merging information and communication sciences, science and technology studies (STS) and international law. Her research has been awarded the French Privacy and Data Protection Commission’s Prix Informatique et Libertés 2013, the OpenEdition Books Select distinction in 2019, and the runner up CNIL-Inria Prize for Privacy Protection in 2019. Her personal page is here and she tweets at @franmusiani.
This event is part of the Data Sovereignty Seminar Series, jointly organised by CD2I and the UNU-CRIS/VUB Chair on Digital Sovereignty.