Wiring digital justice: Embedding rights in Internet governance by infrastructure - I

Abstract

Session subtitle: "Infrastructures as Interfaces of Activism, Resistance and Control"

This session seeks to explore how the language of civil rights and freedoms can be translated in the language and materiality of infrastructures and what the complexities are that arise from this process. As Keller Easterling (2014) writes “changes to the globalizing world are being written, not in the language of law and diplomacy, but rather in the language of infrastructure”. From Internet routing protocols to network architecture solutions, infrastructures “set the invisible rules that govern the spaces of our everyday lives” (Ibid).

From Iran to Germany, this session brings up a selection of ethnographic research exploring how different forms of grassroots, local and activist-led tech activism are encoding freedoms into tools, protocols and everyday practices.

Chair

• Stefania Milan, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Individual Presentations

• Assembling digital infrastructures in alternative housing & activism - Andrea Schikowitz, University of Vienna, Department of Science and Technology Studies

• Carving Out Tunnels: Re-creating Communications and Circumventing Censorship in Iran - Raha Peyravi, Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT)

• Conceptualizing “Sociotechnical Interventions” in Digital Infrastructures: Case studies of “tech activism” - Stephane Couture, Université de Montréal

• Encoding Freedom: Analysis of open search technology between German hacker ethics and Asian start-up culture - Astrid Mager, Austrian Academy of Sciences

Session Organizer

• Ksenia Ermoshina, CNRS