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PERSPECTIVE article
Front. Commun.
Sec. Media Governance and the Public Sphere
Volume 10 - 2025 |
doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2025.1562072
This article is part of the Research Topic Understanding Media Policy in the 21st Century: Affirmation, Challenge, Re-constitution View all articles
Reassessing "infrastructuring digital sovereignty": digital self-determination as a set of infrastructure-embedded practices
Provisionally accepted- 1 CNRS Centre Internet et Société, Paris, France
- 2 Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris, France
This Perspective contribution takes stock of recent research conducted through the theoretical lens, grounded in science and technology studies (STS) and more specifically infrastructure studies, that I have previously defined as "infrastructuring digital sovereignty" (Musiani 2022). With this concept, I address "digital sovereignty" beyond its strictly legal interpretations and its rhetorical uses in political discourses, by understanding it "from within" as an ongoing series of negotiations, practices, struggles and controversies embedded in infrastructures, their creation, their development and their maintenance. The contribution will discuss how, via two recently-started projects, French and global interdisciplinary teams seek to provide an empirical and theoretical understanding, informed by the social sciences, of digital sovereignty as a set of processes and co-constructed techniques, practices and norms "in the making".
Keywords: digital sovereignty, infrastructure, digital technologies, Science and Technology Studies (STS), Internet governance, Infrastructure studies
Received: 16 Jan 2025; Accepted: 10 Feb 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Musiani. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Francesca Musiani, CNRS Centre Internet et Société, Paris, France
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