[DATAGOV Core] Call for Position Papers: Workshop Deconstructing Infrastructural Expansion: Circulation across Sea, Land, and Sky

[Stefania Milan]

Dear Giulia, it is a great proposition. At a quick read, I can see only limited overlap, except for "infrastructures as investment objects” and digital sovereignty.. i am happy to think along and see how we can potentially contribute 😉 thanks for taking the initiative!

From: Core <core-bounces at lists.datagovlab.net> on behalf of Giulia Campaioli via Core <core at lists.datagovlab.net>
Date: Friday, 10 July 2026 at 15:56
To: core at lists.datagovlab.net <core at lists.datagovlab.net>
Subject: [DATAGOV Core] Fwd: Call for Position Papers: Workshop Deconstructing Infrastructural Expansion: Circulation across Sea, Land, and Sky


Hello team,

Hope you are all doing well. I am slowly addressing all the emails, so sorry for responding to this only now.

I just wanted to remind ourselves about this workshop organized by the CIL. I think it could be a very interesting ws to participate to. In particular, our project may connect well with one of these themes, in my opinion:

  *   Infrastructure as asset class
  *   Digital sovereignty as industrial policy
  *   The stack as a site of power
  *   Counter-infrastructures and building otherwise

There is still quite some time for the submission (deadline 15 september 2026), which would have to be a 3-pages paper; is anyone interested in thinking together what we could propose? If so, please respond to this email and we can organize a little working group. If not, no worries, and have a wonderful weekend!

Best,
Giulia

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject:
Call for Position Papers: Workshop Deconstructing Infrastructural Expansion: Circulation across Sea, Land, and Sky
Date:
Fri, 3 Jul 2026 15:12:45 +0200
From:
Fieke Jansen <j.c.m.jansen2 at uva.nl><mailto:j.c.m.jansen2 at uva.nl>
To:
Carolina Maurity Frossard <c.maurityfrossard at uva.nl><mailto:c.maurityfrossard at uva.nl>, finn.dammann at fau.de<mailto:finn.dammann at fau.de> <finn.dammann at fau.de><mailto:finn.dammann at fau.de>, policante at gmail.com<mailto:policante at gmail.com> <policante at gmail.com><mailto:policante at gmail.com>, fdouzet at gmail.com<mailto:fdouzet at gmail.com> <fdouzet at gmail.com><mailto:fdouzet at gmail.com>, escorne.charlotte at gmail.com<mailto:escorne.charlotte at gmail.com> <escorne.charlotte at gmail.com><mailto:escorne.charlotte at gmail.com>, sophiehamel27 at gmail.com<mailto:sophiehamel27 at gmail.com> <sophiehamel27 at gmail.com><mailto:sophiehamel27 at gmail.com>, kave.salamatian at gmail.com<mailto:kave.salamatian at gmail.com> <kave.salamatian at gmail.com><mailto:kave.salamatian at gmail.com>, jonathan.guiffard at gmail.com<mailto:jonathan.guiffard at gmail.com> <jonathan.guiffard at gmail.com><mailto:jonathan.guiffard at gmail.com>, lealepezron at orange.fr<mailto:lealepezron at orange.fr> <lealepezron at orange.fr><mailto:lealepezron at orange.fr>, franken at peasec.tu-darmstadt.de<mailto:franken at peasec.tu-darmstadt.de> <franken at peasec.tu-darmstadt.de><mailto:franken at peasec.tu-darmstadt.de>, shreyabatra881 at gmail.com<mailto:shreyabatra881 at gmail.com> <shreyabatra881 at gmail.com><mailto:shreyabatra881 at gmail.com>, paul.adams at austin.utexas.edu<mailto:paul.adams at austin.utexas.edu> <paul.adams at austin.utexas.edu><mailto:paul.adams at austin.utexas.edu>, Stefania Milan <S.Milan at uva.nl><mailto:S.Milan at uva.nl>, Giulia Campaioli <g.campaioli at uva.nl><mailto:g.campaioli at uva.nl>, Mattéo Bard <m.bard at uva.nl><mailto:m.bard at uva.nl>, Meg Kitamura <m.kitamura at uva.nl><mailto:m.kitamura at uva.nl>, Sruthi Vanguri <s.vanguri at uva.nl><mailto:s.vanguri at uva.nl>, Carina Romañach Nasser <c.romanachnasser2 at uva.nl><mailto:c.romanachnasser2 at uva.nl>, Virginie Mamadouh <V.D.Mamadouh at uva.nl><mailto:V.D.Mamadouh at uva.nl>, Ouejdane Sabbah <o.sabbah at uva.nl><mailto:o.sabbah at uva.nl>, Pablo Zagt Hernandez <p.zagthernandez at uva.nl><mailto:p.zagthernandez at uva.nl>, Milan Babic <m.babic at uva.nl><mailto:m.babic at uva.nl>, Marisa Mori <m.k.mori at uva.nl><mailto:m.k.mori at uva.nl>, Valentina Carraro <v.carraro2 at uva.nl><mailto:v.carraro2 at uva.nl>, Bartosz Fingas <bartosz.fingas at student.uva.nl><mailto:bartosz.fingas at student.uva.nl>
CC:
niels at criticalinfralab.net<mailto:niels at criticalinfralab.net> <niels at criticalinfralab.net><mailto:niels at criticalinfralab.net>



Dear submarine cable friends and collegues,

The critical infrastructure lab, Centre for Internet and Society at CNRS, Inria and University of Lille are organizing the 2nd infrastructure workshop titled: Deconstructing Infrastructural Expansion: Circulation across Sea, Land, and Sky<https://www.criticalinfralab.net/2026/06/workshop-announcement-and-call-for-position-papers/> (abstract is at the end of the email). The workshop will take place on teh 28 – 29th of January 2027 at the University of Amsterdam.

Important dates

  *   Short Position Paper Submission Deadline: 15th September 2026
  *   Notification of Acceptance: 1st of November 2026
  *   Workshop: 28 – 29th of January 2027

We are looking for short position papers of about 3-pages (maximum 1500 words) that engage with infrastructural expansion and circulation. In general, a position paper outlines a stance on a particular issue or topic and provides arguments and evidence to support this view. There will be no formal presentation of the papers, but they will shape the agenda and the discussion. Following the workshop, we will discuss the possibility of a joint publication that can serve as an intervention into the field.

Submit your position papers as PDF by sending it attached to an email to submission at criticalinfralab.net<mailto:submission at criticalinfralab.net> with the subject line ‘[sea|land|sky] paper title’

best Fieke and Niels


About the workshop

In the geopolitical race for technological hegemony, regimes are using digital sovereignty policies to enact control and grow their own digital economy. A central element of these industrial policies is the creation of an enabling environment for infrastructural expansion: targeted investment in the technology sector, deprioritization of environmental and social protection, and creation of new electricity infrastructures are all meant to underwrite the build-out of submarine cables, data centres, telecommunication infrastructures, and satellite constellations. Industrial policies are proposed to derisk supply chains on which national and economic security depend.  Infrastructure space itself becomes a medium of statecraft (Easterling 2014),  where power is reconfigured through design, finance, technology, and circulation.

The world becomes ever further enmeshed in a circulation complex that both encases nature and society for generations to come. In this workshop, circulation offers a lens to understand both the workings of the entire market and its relation to that of specific industries (Kjøsen 2018). It allows for theorization about how the externalisation of costs, regulatory capture, corporate power, and the generation of financial power that propels infrastructural expansion outward and downward, from the seabed to low earth orbit, and how these dynamics are encoded into routing decisions, protocol design, and systems architecture.

Topics of Interest
In this second infrastructure workshop, we are interested in thinking through the consequences of the increasing private ownership of expanding communication infrastructure from the sea to the sky and methods of measuring it. We attend to the territories, people, natural resources, and environments being sacrificed in the name of progress, economic growth, and control (Mollen et al. 2026), the violence that circulation and logistics carry with them (Cowen 2014), and critical quantitative and qualitative methods to foreground underpinning patterns. We ask what technical inquiry can reveal that other approaches cannot: how the measurement of interconnection and autonomous systems exposes the concentration of ownership; how the materiality of compute, spectrum, and orbit decides who gets to build and who does not; and how shifting ownership structures and modalities translate, operationally, across submarine cables, data centres, and low-orbit satellites. We therefore welcome contributions that bring network measurement, systems design, and security research into contact with political economy and critical theory, alongside work that asks how people engage with and contest these configurations, whether alternative architectures are possible, and what it is that we want from our communication infrastructures in the first place.

Themes and topics
The 2nd INFRASTRUCTURE Workshop brings together researchers from Science and Technology Studies (STS), Political Economy, Social and Human Geography, Computer Science, and related fields to critically examine the material, environmental, political, and socio-technical foundations of today’s computing systems. We invite contributions that address, but are not limited to:

  *   Sea, land, and sky as infrastructural frontiers: submarine cables, terrestrial data centres, and low-orbit satellite constellations as sites of expansion, and how the three domains are being knitted into a single circulation complex.
  *   Infrastructure as asset class: the financialisation of connectivity and computation; firms as financial instruments and infrastructures as investment objects; venture capital, private equity, and the conditions of public listings.
  *   Externalisation and its costs: the environmental, territorial, and labour costs displaced onto people, ecologies, and resources; energy and water demand, mineral extraction, and land use; regulatory capture and algorithmic control as mechanisms of cost-shifting.
  *   Digital sovereignty as industrial policy: state investment, deregulation, and subsidy regimes that build an enabling environment for expansion; the US-China race for technological hegemony and its peripheries.
  *   Circulation as concept and method: theoretical and empirical engagements with circulation (Kjøsen 2018; Dyer-Witheford and Mularoni 2025); the circuit linking labour, data, advertising, logistics, and the production of desire; and what the concept reveals that other frames miss.
  *   Logistics, ownership, and the state: logistical power and the violence of global trade (Cowen 2014); shifting ownership structures across cables, data centres, and satellites; public, private, and hybrid arrangements; and the material limits of sovereignty claims.
  *   The stack as a site of power: routing and peering, protocol standards, autonomous systems, and default configurations as the places where ownership and control are quietly enacted; and what network measurement, interconnection analysis, and the study of traffic and dependency can reveal about concentration, chokepoints, and the limits of sovereignty at the technical layer.
  *   Counter-infrastructures and building otherwise: how engineers, communities, and publics contest, repair, and reimagine these systems; commons-based, federated, and decentralised architectures; and the technical and political conditions under which alternative designs become viable or are foreclosed.

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