The workshop takes place over two days, comprising day 1 for practical experiments and day 2 for theoretical debates. The rituals and experiments of the first day provide food for thought for the debates of the second day. The structure of the workshop aims to provide common experiences and inspirations for the participants in order to help with developing coherent arguments together.

Internet governance as a research area addresses how power is exercised over and through communication networks via technical, social, economic and political means. The proposition of the workshop is that discussions within internet governance scholarship have exhausted their explanatory and interpretive limits. Thus, we need to look for inspiration towards integrating critical strands of investigations into internet governance from anticolonial, feminist, materialist and ecological investigations. Furthermore, we need to make internet governance relevant to current debates in society, culture and technology. The participants would take up this challenge by starting with the debates on digital sovereignty and asking how the alternative perspective of digital solidarity could produce critical internet governance scholarship, renewing the field and enriching adjacent fields of research.

The workshop would prepare further discussions the following days at the annual meeting of the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S), which will take place in Toronto just after this proposed gathering. The initiative builds on previous collaboration between the critical infrastructure lab and the network of Internet governance scholars in Brasil, REDE (the Research Network on Internet Governance). The institutional aim of the workshop is to integrate international and Toronto area scholars into this fruitful and ongoing collaboration.

Two keynote speakers will introduce the theme (digital solidarity). Stanislav Budnitsky (Research Fellow at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine) will discuss how digital solidarity have been used by policy actors so far, including during the World Summit on Information Society, by the European Commission, and in foreign policy of the United States of America. Rafael Grohmann (Assistant Professor at University of Toronto) will introduce the perspective of social movements based on his recent research into Digital Solidarity Economies.