critical infrastructure lab at the University of Amsterdam
Centre for Internet and Society at CNRS
Inria
University of Lille

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.

Submission

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@criticalinfralab.net with the subject line ‘[sea|land|sky] paper title’ 

Important dates

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

Other information 

This 2nd Infrastructure workshop is hosted by the critical infrastructure lab at the University of Amsterdam. It builds on and follows from the 1st INFRASTRUCTURE Workshop organized by LS2N and CNRS.

Please note that we have limited funds to support people travelling to Amsterdam. This option is intended to support those who could not otherwise participate in the event, especially early career researchers.

References

Cowen, D. (2014). The deadly life of logistics: Mapping violence in global trade. University of Minnesota Press.

Dyer-Witheford, N., & Mularoni, A. (2025). Cybernetic circulation complex: Big tech and planetary crisis. Verso.

Easterling, K. (2014). Extrastatecraft: The power of infrastructure space. Verso.

Kjøsen, A. M. (2018). Circulation. In A. Pendakis, I. Szeman, & J. Diamanti (Eds.), The Bloomsbury companion to Marx (pp. 281–288). Bloomsbury Academic.

Mollen, A., Jansen, F., Kannengießer, S., & Velkova, J. (2026). AI infrastructures and sustainability: Expanding perspectives on automation, communication and media. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-09748-4

Steinhoff, J., Kjøsen, A. M., & Dyer-Witheford, N. (2024). Stagnation, circulation, and the automated abyss. In J. Fehrle, M. Lieber, & J. J. Ramirez (Eds.), (De)Automating the future: Marxist perspectives on capitalism and technology (pp. 288–310). Brill.

2026-06-26 15:15–15:45, Plenary room (1B.10) Language: English

European digital sovereignty initiatives focus on reducing dependence on US companies by creating European alternatives and through data localisation. This approach overlooks a fundamental problem: network externalities create continued US dominance even under European ownership. In this talk, Niels compares Russia’s isolationist network sovereignty, China’s government-directed standardization, and argues for a distinctly European approach. This approach is rooted in developing an alternative technological trajectory by designing open architectures that distribute power and embed European values: democratic governance, environmental sustainability, privacy, and social inclusion.

Details: June 24 12.00-14.00 at the University of Amsterdam. Please register here and we will send you the details.

About the speaker
Felipe Silva Figueiredo is a visiting researcher at the critical infrastructure lab. he is a phd student at the it university of copenhagen, in denmark. he has background in anthropology and science and technology studies. felipe’s current phd research focuses on the political ecology of data centers and energy infrastructures in iceland, and how electricity shapes the sustainability and the limits of computation. his general interests lie in the intersection between infrastructure development and environmental crisis, and ways of resisting capitalism.

This Sunday (21.06.) from 13:00 onwards at the Carolus Cinema Squat in Nijmegen we will come together to gather the digital needs of our communities and figure out together how to set up secure, autonomous communication networks with the Reticulum Network Stack.  We choose to focus on Reticulum because it is designed for heterogeneous networks built from various cheap devices, to be deployed in a bottom up way by small communities.  It is a toolkit for building many different networks, with a focus on the decentralisation of power, low energy operation, and security. The event is also an opportunity to reimagine the Internet and our digital dependencies and plot together on how to build towards more self-determination and autonomy.

The mesh network stack runs on various platforms.  You can run it on your desktop, your home server, your mobile phone or antennas on the roof.  In the workshop, we will explore three layers of networking in dedicated working groups:

(1) The content layer, where communities are building the “social worlds of Reticulum” we can inhabit. What services and information communities and users find fruitful to circulate on an autonomous network?  Reticulum networks can host “micron pages”, which are like websites from the 1980s.  People around the world make them for both global and local circulation.  Unlike on the Internet, anyone connected to the network can also host content and become a service provider.

(2) The radio layer, where information is transmitted through waves of energy in the electro-magnetic spectrum. We use chat apps over local peer-to-peer Bluetooth, WiFi, and Lora (“long range”) links, as well as connecting to Reticulum servers on the Internet.  We explore the capabilities of each frequency and protocol: when are they useful, what ranges can they cover, which scenarios they fit well?  Who can transmit no which frequencies?  What does it mean to operate your own network?

(3) The network and transport layers, where the Reticulum Network Stack integrates into scenes, connects communities over time and space, transforming cities.  We make some standalone nodes to deploy around Nijmegen to eventually build out an autonomous communication infrastructure.  In the course of this operation, we can discuss how local scenes are organised in space, in terms of social relations and aspirations, cultural codes and interoperable political traditions.  How can movements network and transform the city, inhabit urban space and invent new forms of life?

The ultimate goal of the workshop is to work towards a paper zine on community networking, based on the experience of the three work groups that explore different socio-technical layers.

• No prior knowledge is needed! 
• Bring your laptop if you can. 
• After the session dinner will be provided.

More information about the Reticulum Network Stack for community building can be found on the dedicated website here: https://reticulum.community/

The event is open to all, on donation.  We call on participants to reflect on gender dynamics during the event, since critical approaches to technology invite the performance of particular masculinities that tend to reproduce patriarchal power relations, even in the guise of hacker cultures and decentralised political aspirations.  Please also be aware that participation implies to accept the safer spaces policy of Jantien, which will be introduced at the beginning of the event.

Workshop includes Adrian Friday, Fieke Jansen, Gauthier Rousillhe, and Srinjoy Mitra.

https://conf.researchr.org/details/ict4s-2026/ict4s-2026-workshops/9/The-True-Cost-of-ICT-Crisis-of-Abundance

Registration info for the ICT4S conference or only the workshop can be found here https://conf.researchr.org/attending/ict4s-2026/registration

Date 2 June 2026
Time 17:00 -18:30
Location SPUI25

Digital Public Infrastructures or DPIs are the latest buzzword in global policy and governance circles, promoted by the United Nations, the World Bank, global philanthropies and governments across Global North and South. DPIs originated from the India Stack model to build meta, stackable digital infrastructures (for identity, payment and data) for seamless flows of public goods and services, where the state is responsible towards building public facing digital infrastructures and actual goods and service delivery are opened up to both public and private sectors. As per recent reports, there are more than 100 countries building DPI or DPI-like infrastructures. While their definition and meaning are fuzzy and contested, they offer new ways of thinking about infrastructures, governance and role of the state in times of crisis for state sovereignty and democratic institutions.

As infrastructures allow the state to translate its political power into everyday features of life and thereby represent its power to its citizens, it thus becomes important to unpack what power constellations DPIs are constituted of, how will they shift existing regulatory, bureaucratic and technical arrangements of governance, and what implication will they hold for state sovereignty and democratic institutions. To address some of these questions, we invite you to a panel discussion with:

Niels Ten Oever Assistant Professor in the European Studies department and co-principal investigator of the critical infrastructure lab at the University of Amsterdam working on how invisible infrastructures shape the socio-technical ordering of information societies and how this influences the distribution of wealth, power, and opportunities

Carolina Maurity Frossard Assistant Professor in the Political & Economic Geographies, and co-director of the Centre for Urban Studies at the Amsterdam Institute of Social Science Research (AISSR), University of Amsterdam examining how digital devices and infrastructures shape socio-spatial politics and inequalities at different scales

Nafis A. Hasan Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam studying impacts of digital technology on humans and organizations in the realm of public governance in South Asia

Bidisha Chaudhuri Assistant Professor of Government, Information Cultures and Digital Citizenship in the Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, investigating the political economy of digital infrastructures and governance in the Global South

https://rdt.uva.nl/content/events/2026/06/from-india-stack-to-euro-stack-infrastructuring-state-and-governance.html

Day 1 – Monday, June 1st (Room: 1.09)

Day 1 – Monday, June 1st

Energy, Food and Data Justice (Chair: Fieke Jansen, Room: 1.05)

Day 1 – Monday, June 1st

11.15 – 12.45 PARALLEL SESSIONS A: AI and Data Infrastructure (Chair: Jedrzej Niklas, Room: 1.07)