critical infrastructure lab

The event will start with a presentation by the Author, followed by comments by Dr. Kristina Irion (Institute for Information Law, UvA) and Dr. Andrea Leiter (Amsterdam Center for International Law, UvA) and by a Q&A with the audience, moderated by Dr. Niels ten Oever (Department of European Studies and critical infrastructure lab, UvA).

The event is a joint initiative from the ARTES transversal clusters ‘Power and governance’ and ‘Digital networks, communications, and technologies’.

About the book:

This book explores the dynamic legal semantics of territory as applied to data. It offers a theoretical assessment of the legal challenges that data flows pose for the principle of territoriality and for state sovereignty more generally. The concept of sovereignty has traditionally developed in close connection with the exercise of powers over a territory, and ideas of jurisdiction have always been based on the principle of territoriality. Digitalization questions however the very idea of physical frontiers. Interconnected networks make data in effect borderless. Data can in fact be created, stored, processed, and accessed anytime and from anywhere.

The idea of the book is upbeat: the law can keep pace with the ability of data to fragment reality. The condition for this is that sovereignty disconnects from territory. Disconnection is not getting rid of the territory once and for all, it only means that for data alternatives to the territorial connection exist.

About the Author:

Mariavittoria Catanzariti is a Research Fellow at the Robert Shuman Centre and Assistant Professor of Legal Philosophy at University of Padua. She joined the European University Institute as Jean Monnet Fellow in 2017. Barrister in law since 2010, she obtained a PhD in Law with a special focus on Legal Philosophy and European Law from Roma Tre University in 2011 and the Italian Scientific Qualification as Associate Professor in Legal Sociology in 2018. Her main research interest revolves around the interaction of digital transformation and information society with the law. Her publications cover different legal areas such as privacy and data protection, law and technologies, human rights, and legal sociology.

Time and Date: 17:00-18:30, 18 December 2024

Location: Humanities Labs, Bushuis F0.01, Kloveniersburgwal 48 (main entrance), 1012 CX Amsterdam

Open Cities research platform November Research-in-Progress Seminar:

Technological Sovereignty in Media Infrastructures: Indigenous 5G Networks in India

Technological sovereignty is increasingly sounded by policy makers world wide as the common objective of three megatrends: digitalisation, decarbonisation and deglobalisation. Within such a framework, Maxigas examines how “indigenous 5G networks” are articulated in India. The empirical material is drawn from recent infrastructural ethnography in Delhi and Bangalore, which focused on making new media in the context of the government’s “Make in India” campaign. The story takes place on contested territory defined by the geopolitical ambitions, telecommunications standards, and technology vendors of the USA, EU and China. The findings are made relevant to the burning questions of the day by contrasting them with current policy developments closer to home. In particular, the ongoing debate on industrial policy for the new European Council, the publication of the Draghi report, and the conference on European Digital Independence.

Prof. dr. Payal Arora will be the main discussant.

7 November 2024, 15:00-18:00 at the Grote Zaal, Muntstraat 2A in Utrecht and online through a videocall

Registration

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About the roundtable: it will focus on designs for an ecosocial transition, in three key areas. It will address the planned transformations of spatiality (urbanism and architecture), technologies, and our relations to animals required for desirable ecosocial transitions.

More information can be found here

Date and place:

24 October, 2024

About the panel:

Eco, green, or simply sustainable technologies have several implicit meanings: long life, affordable maintenance, skilled people, resource-friendly, economical to use, renewable, regenerative, etc. In this panel, thinkers, practitioners and promoters of different aspects of software sustainability will discuss if and how it is possible to achieve a development model for people and the planet. Is there a way out of the disaster versus greenwashing narratives?

Panelists: 
– Christoph Becker, Associate Professor at University of Toronto, author of “Insolvent: How to Reorient Computing for Just Sustainability”
– Shweata Hegde, Developer at semanticClimate 
– Fieke Jansen, Co-principal Investigator at Critical Infrastructure Lab 
– Paz Peña, Independent consultant and activist, author of “Technologies for a burning planet” 
– Maxwell Beganim, Co-lead of the Open Goes COP coalition, Director of Open Knowledge Ghana 

Moderator: Lucas Pretti, OKFN

More information can be found here

At the 10th European Communication Conference ECREA 2024, Communication & social (dis)order, Fieke Jansen will talk about imagining spaces of governing AI infrastructures.

About the panel:

The hype around generative AI, like ChatGPT, is gaining increasing attention in media and communication research with a focus on transformations in communication and human-machine-interaction. This panel reorients these discussions towards an interrogation of the infrastructures, practices, and more-than-human relations that sustain the operations of technologies that go under the label of “AI”.

Questions that regard the socio-ecological relations and their far reaching implications to justice, environments, and infrastructures that emerge from practices of use and development of “AI” remain insufficiently discussed in media and communication studies, despite landmark work in critical data studies and Machine Learning that reveals the exploitation of resources, nature and humans caused by the production, training, and maintenance of especially so-called large language models (LLMs) (Crawford 2021; Bender et al., 2021). This work makes imperative to bring the analysis of relations between AI infrastructures, questions of sustainability and emerging forms of disorder to the core of concerns for research of digital cultures and communication.

This panel discusses AI infrastructures in relation to questions of sustainability. It explores approaches, empiric objects and the multi-valent implications of AI developments in different contexts, contributing to research on infrastructures in media and communication studies and interdisciplinary research on the socio-ecological implications of AI technologies, aspects of sustainability and global injustices.

The individual papers propose approaches to deconstruct norms embedded within AI development and application with relevance for socio-ecological justice through the application of sociological practice theory (paper 1); to analyse emergent frictions and inequalities at the intersection between transforming digital and energy infrastructures (paper 2). They also critically assess the expanding terrains of “green extractivism” of the digital industries that claim to solve sustainability issues through the application of data-intensive technologies exemplified by the case of aquaculture (paper 3) and explore spaces of governance as imagined by civil society actors that counterpose narratives of AI and efficiency (paper 4). All panel contributions demonstrate how investigating the multiple human and more-than human materialities, infrastructures, and practices that sustain AI are productive for deconstructing narratives of AI technologies, especially in relation to matters of socio-ecological justice, while also addressing questions of power, agency, inequalities, and multiple forms of disorders. The panel equally addresses media and communication research’s responsibility to conduct transformative research on AI infrastructures (paper 5), when being confronted with the need for a great socio-ecological transformation.

Please take a look at the schedule here.

More information about the conference can be found on the ECREA 2024 website.