critical infrastructure lab

Towards Critical Internet Governance: Centering Power and Struggles for Justice and Distribution

Special Issue Editors: Niels ten Oever, Fieke Jansen, Fernanda Rosa, Roxana Radu

TL;DR: Please submit a 750-word extended abstract outlining your research question, theoretical framework, methodology, and contribution to the field of critical internet governance by July 1 to submission@criticalinfralab.net . We will notify you by September 1 whether your abstract has been accepted, and will inform you of the target journal as soon as possible.

Over the past three decades, the Internet has shifted from an exploratory, experimental space to a densely financialised and highly consolidated infrastructure (Ortiz Freuler 2022). Where the “early Internet” was an unknown place that nonetheless felt like a home to a nascent community actively shaping its ecosystem, there were already many power structures at play (DeNardis 2009, Russell 2014, Carr 2015, Radu 2019). Today’s Internet is intimately familiar to billions, mostly as users and consumers, yet increasingly inhospitable and ungovernable to many (Bhat 2020). This transformation has profound implications for how Internet governance should be understood, practised, and studied.

Internet governance as a field emerged in a period when the Internet was widely perceived as a space for exploration in modes of connection and institutional experimentation, rather than extraction. In this zeitgeist, scholarly interest in the concentration of power in a distributed infrastructure focused primarily on theorizing about its technical coordination, regulatory design, and institutional arrangements. In doing so, scholars often omit to engage with other disciplines that situate these developments within histories of exploitation and extraction, such as decolonial, feminist, environmental, and broader social justice perspectives (Rosa 2022, Jansen 2025). 

The contemporary Internet, structured around platform capitalism, corporate concentration, and opaque infrastructural arrangements invites a transformation of Internet governance scholarship. The Internet’s significant social, economic, and environmental dependencies demand dialogue and engagement with a wider set of perspectives that offer critique and imagine “emancipatory alternatives to transcend the status quo” (Gunderson, 2020, p. 89; Ruha, 2024). This Special Issue takes up that challenge by asking: How do critical approaches to internet governance reveal the infrastructural and institutional foundations of power and ideology in the contemporary Internet, and in what ways can these insights generate alternative trajectories and pluriversal perspectives aimed at reconfiguring individual/collective rights, agency, and opportunity?

This Special Issue on Critical Internet Governance builds on a 4S (Society for Social Studies of Science) pre-conference held at the University of Amsterdam in July 2024, and a satellite event at AOIR (Association of Internet Researchers) held in Rio de Janeiro in July 2025, where scholars from around the world convened to rethink what a critical field of Internet governance could be. Participants highlighted how crucial questions of power, materiality, environmental justice, disability, gender, race, ethnicity, socio-economic inequalities, digital colonialism, and sovereignty, along with the role of non-human actors and ecologies, remain marginal in mainstream Internet governance debates, even as they are increasingly central to emerging work on infrastructures, platforms, and AI.

The Special Issue invites contributions that foreground the technopolitics of the Internet and its infrastructures through plural, critical, and situated approaches. We particularly welcome work that:

• Foregrounds the study of power in internet governance, including infrastructural consolidation, materiality, and political economy 
• Brings decolonial, Black, anti-racist, feminist, Indigenous, and anti-fascist perspectives to Internet governance institutions, practices, and standards 
• Connects Internet governance to environmental justice, resource extraction, and the materialities of digital infrastructures
• Reconsiders sovereignty, jurisdiction, and control in relation to transnational power asymmetries and global South perspectives 
• Examines how AI, platforms, and other “applications on top” of the Internet reconfigure governance, responsibility, and accountability
• Centers marginalized actors and “invisible” forms of governance, including community networks, and grassroots initiatives 
• Expands the unit of analysis beyond states and corporations to include non-human actors, ecologies, and long-durée historical, social, political, and economic  processes

By bringing together Internet governance scholars and researchers from adjacent and intersecting fields (including STS, critical data studies, media studies, communications, political economy, environmental humanities, decolonial, feminist and Indigenous studies, and law), this Special Issue aims to consolidate and amplify a critical turn in Internet governance. The goal is not only to broaden the conceptual and empirical scope of the field, but also to reimagine its sense of community: who counts as an Internet governance scholar, what infrastructures and practices are considered, and which futures of the Internet are rendered thinkable.

We welcome theoretical, empirical, methodological, and positional contributions in the form of full journal articles that engage with Internet governance as a site of contestation over global digital media infrastructures and that propose alternative horizons for governing the Internet otherwise.

Please submit a 750-word extended abstract outlining your research question, theoretical framework, methodology, and contribution to the field of critical internet governance by July 1 to submission@criticalinfralab.net . We will notify you by September 1 whether your abstract has been accepted by the editors, and will inform you of the target journal as soon as possible.

References

Benjamin, Ruha. 2024. Imagination: A Manifesto ‎ W. W. Norton & Company

Bhat, R. (2020). The politics of internet infrastructure: Communication policy, governmentality and subjectivation in Chhattisgarh, India [PhD Thesis]. The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

Carr, M. (2015). Power Plays in Global Internet Governance. Millennium, 43(2), 640–659. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829814562655

DeNardis, Laura. Protocol Politics: The Globalization of Internet Governance. MIT Press, 2009.

Jansen, F. (2025). From growth to scarcity: Can Internet Governance meet the ecological crisis? Critical Internet Governance: From Positions to a Field, 44. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15627726 

Gunderson T. (2020). Making the Familiar Strange: Sociology Contra Reification. Routledge.

Ortiz Freuler, J. (2022). The weaponization of private corporate infrastructure: Internet fragmentation and coercive diplomacy in the 21st century. Global Media and China, doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/20594364221139729

Radu, R. (2019). Negotiating Internet Governance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rosa, F. R. (2022). From community networks to shared networks: The paths of Latin-Centric Indigenous networks to a pluriversal internet. Information, Communication & Society, 26(11), 2326-2344. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2022.2085614 

Russell, A. L. (2014). Open Standards and the Digital Age. Cambridge University Press.

Truscello, M. (2023). The Internet Shutdown and Revolutionary Politics: Defining the Infrastructural Power of the Internet. South Atlantic Quarterly, 122(4), 811–826.

Propose contribution!

It is clear that 5G makes a difference, but for a variety of factors it is far from settled what difference that difference makes. This combined format open panel seeks to convene new conversations about the transformations accompanying 5G, both to the information environment and network topology.

At the intersection of geopolitical struggle between global superpowers, domestic panics about viral conspiracy theories, and rapidly changing network infrastructures, 5G technology has emerged as a unique object of concern and contestation. This combined format open panel invites participants to present new research and engage in roundtable discussion on the transformations affected by the rollout of 5G devices and telecommunication networks. Such changes are broadly distributed and uniquely suited to the modalities offered by STS. They encompass global trade tensions, novel design choices by standard setters, and sustainable development goals, as well as renewed campaigns to define the place of wireless technology in contemporary society. To adequately address these transformations and the challenges they bring with them, critical scholarship on 5G must navigate between the quicksand of conspiratorial disinformation and the mirage of heavily financialized technosolutionism. This panel seeks to gather together a variety of researchers working in diverse locales on different aspects of 5G, in order to identify common obstacles, share collective insights, and advance the vocabulary of critical 5G research. Of special concern are the material contexts in which 5G technologies are situated, the workings of power in telecommunication networks, and their potentials for democratic engagement. What can the socio-technical differences 5G makes tell us about moments of transition? With this panel, we hope to make 5G matter as more than a marketing fad or lurid conspiracy theory and transform the terrain of 5G research in STS and related fields. We welcome proposals for paper presentations, workshops, and dialogue sessions.

Panel on the conference website

Conference website

Propose contribution!

The world is burning, but in and from the ashes a new world will be built. A new world needs new ideologies to inform subjectivity, organization, and materiality. In this panel we will interrogate experimental approaches to infrastructural ideologies that center limits, redistribution, and reduction.

The climate crisis, planetary scarcity, human limitations, and (geo)political conflicts force us to rethink transnational communication infrastructures to overcome their extractive, colonial, and imperialist tendencies. As policymakers, researchers, citizens, artists, users, and industry, it becomes increasingly hard to know and act in and through increasingly complex, layered, and entangled networks. To ensure that new infrastructures serve the public interest and contribute to social, economic, and environmental stability, we see an urgent need to develop alternative propositions for sustainable and equitable internet and digital technologies. Specifically, in this combined open panel we are responding to the need to articulate new ideologies, set a positive agenda, to inform subjectivity, organization, and materiality. In this combined format open panel we will interrogate theoretical, empirical, and speculative approaches to infrastructural ideologies that center limits, redistribution, and reduction over extraction, profit, and capital.

Since the internet has become the scaffolding of everyday life, there is a clear need to think and build beyond the principles of openness, interconnections, and networks. Now is the time to develop and prototype narratives about internet infrastructures that center people and the planet over profit and capital. Because an ideology cannot consist of text alone, this combined open panel will combine academic presentations, with a workshop and an interactive immersive experience.

This panel builds on the open panel ‘Overcoming Sociotechnical Imaginaries: infrastructural ideologies and materialities?’ organized at 4S 2023 in Honolulu and is in conversation with a growing body of work across – but not limited to – STS, media studies, infrastructure studies, and critical internet studies.

We encourage a diversity of submissions to help think through the complexity of today and develop new ideologies. These submissions can include but are not limited to, academic papers, essays, speculative fiction, solar punk, technology, code, and artistic interventions and installations.

Panel on the conference website

Conference website

you can find the schedule here

executive summary / tl;dr

• the critical infrastructure lab launches on april 13-14, 2023 at the university of amsterdam
• send in your session proposals for interactive workshops on april 13th (the lab day)
• send in your extended abstracts (academics) or position statements (practitioners) for the panel sessions on april 14th (the research day)
• send submissions to submission@criticalinfralab.net by march 1st (750-1000 words)

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“infrastructure makes worlds” — ned rossiter
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dear colleague, friend, comrade,

communications infrastructures constitute the invisible scaffolding of social life. largely concealed to their end-users, they are becoming the main stage where local and global economic, social, environmental, and geopolitical conflicts are played out. once established, infrastructures shape societies for decades to come.

on the 13th and 14th of april we will launch the critical infrastructure lab to discuss and develop visions of how communication infrastructures can serve the public interest — and we want to do that with you!

work in the critical infrastructure lab will focus on the development of new infrastructural futures that center people and planet over profit and capital. hosted at the university of amsterdam and led by fieke jansen, niels ten oever, and maxigas, the lab will bring together activists, advocates, scholars, policymakers, and industry actors. three analytical lenses of standards, geopolitics and environment will be applied to built an evidence base, investigate and develop infrastructural imaginaries, and create actionable research for infrastructures that serve the public interest.

about the launch event
the two-day event at the university of amsterdam will take place on the 13th and 14th of april. it will be a mix of keynote speakers, hands-on workshops, infrastructure walks, and panel discussions. both days will be in person, but day 1 will be streamed. for both days, we invite session proposals from activists, advocates, scholars, policymakers, and industry.

day zero, 13th of april, will be a hands-on lab day. it will offer space for interactive sessions on geopolitics, environment, and standards. we invite proposals for sessions of 2.5 hours. for instance, workshops, infrastructure walks, policy challenges, simulations, etc. pretty much everything that is not a panel or paper presentation.

day one, 14th of april, will have a more academic structure. it will kick off with three keynote presentations followed by panel sessions. the keynote speakers – ksennia ermoshina, svitlana matviyenko, and yu hong – will inspire and challenge us. the keynotes are followed by corinne cath, who will present her research on exclusionary cultures of internet governance.

the afternoon will be dedicated to simultaneous panel sessions in the areas of infrastructure and geopolitics, infrastructure and environment, and infrastructure and standards. academics can submit an extended abstract (research question, theory/literature, method, data, preliminary findings) and practitioners can submit a position statement. these contributions should be between 750 and 1000 words.

want to submit
do you have an idea you want to workshop, a discussion you want to host, or some research that you want to present?

state clearly in an email:

• your name and affiliation,
• whether you are submitting for day zero or day one,
• the research area (infrastructure and geopolitics, infrastructure and environment, or infrastructure and standards)
• include an abstract, position statement or a blurb for an interactive session!

send your submission to submission@criticalinfralab.net by march 1st.

the lab and its research is supported by the ford foundation, the internet society foundation, and omidyar network.