# article From critique to hope: Infrawalking, defamiliarisation, transgressive infrastructuring and utopian engineering April 2026
This article explores how methodological innovation can move media and infrastructure studies from critique toward hope. Building on the infrastructural turn in media studies, we argue that research must go beyond diagnosing power asymmetries to co-creating utopian alternatives that centre people and planet over capital and control. Drawing on experiments from the critical infrastructure lab, we reflect on four methods: infrastructure walks, transgressive infrastructuring, defamiliarisation, and utopian engineering. In these methods, we swap the pairs of infrastructure/governance, discourse/materiality, and values/objects in order to cultivate alternative technological trajectories, thereby unsettling assumptions that current technological developments are inevitable. Rather than treating infrastructures as closed systems, these approaches invite participants, including researchers, policymakers, activists, artists, and industry actors into collaborative processes of relational knowledge production. We argue that such methods embody ‘utopia as a method’ by creating spaces of uncertainty and experimentation that render infrastructures visible, contestable, and reconfigurable. In doing so, they generate not only critique but also openings for collective utopian agendas in an attempt to co-develop alternative infrastructural futures that centre people and planet over capital and control.
From critique to hope: Infrawalking, defamiliarisation, transgressive infrastructuring and utopian engineering, by Fieke Jansen, Maxigas, & Niels ten Oever
# paper Infrastructural anxiety and digital sovereignty: The perceived loss of control in Dutch communication networks March 2026
This paper examines how Dutch citizens and civil servants experience and respond to perceived loss of control over communication infrastructures. Combining a representative survey (N=2,154), 69 semi-structured interviews with 89 participants gathered around an art intervention, and seven elite interviews with civil servants, we develop the concept of infrastructural anxiety: a situated, anticipatory unease about infrastructural governance that encourages actors to externalize responsibility upward (from citizens to the state) and outward (from the state to market and standards fora). We show that data safety and security dominate public concerns, that citizens employ limited privacy tactics but feel unable to affect systemic change, and that civil servants view governance pathways as constrained by global standards and market concentration. In this mixed-method study, we straddle the fields of science and technology studies, media studies, and infrastructure studies to provide insights in the relation between citizens and technology and the state and technology, where these normally are researched in separation. We discuss theoretical implications for digital sovereignty and propose practical measures to better align citizen expectations with institutional capacities.
Infrastructural anxiety and digital sovereignty: The perceived loss of control in Dutch communication networks. First Monday, 31(3) by Fieke Jansen, Niels ten Oever, Sarah Vondran & Maxigas
# report Pathways through the Polycrisis: Proceedings of the critical infrastructure lab retreat October 2025
Pathways through the Polycrisis: Proceedings of the critical infrastructure lab retreat critical infrastructure lab document series CIL#012, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17417380
# report Standardisation with Chinese Characteristics July 2025
Standardisation with Chinese Characteristics by Ferreira Gomes, Okano-Heijmans, Sainato, ten Oever, and Lüdtke
# report Critical Internet Governance: From Positions to a Field June 2025
Critical Internet Governance: From Positions to a Field by critical infrastructure lab and Research Network on Internet Governance (REDE) https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15627726
