critical infrastructure lab

Deconstructing Infrastructural Expansion: Circulation across Sea, Land, and Sky

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.

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

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

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

Putting Money Where Your Mouth Is? Insights into EU R&I Funding for Digital Technologies by Zuzanna Warso & Meret Baumgartner https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15263223

white paper White Paper “How to Meet Europe’s Digital Infrastructure Needs? (in Dutch) – consultation submission by the critical infrastructure lab

Eaten by the Internet, edited by Corinne Cath

Digital infrastructures and environmental justice: policies, practices, and  visions. https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2023i0.13522

building a relational infrastructure; the launch of the critical infrastructure lab, fieke jansen, niels ten oever, maxigas, et al

podcast by bits of freedom featuring fieke jansen introducing the lab