The Social Life of XG: Digital infrastructures and the reconfiguration of sovereignty and imagined communities

In the context of an expansion of digital infrastructures driven by the impact and recovery of the pandemic, we bring together perspectives from queer feminist technoscience, migration and cultural studies, social and political theory, from the EU and the UK, in order to investigate how infrastructural imaginaries (re)configure democratic sovereignty, imagined communities, and practices of bordering of the European Union.

We propose to think and investigate sovereignty through (a) infrastructural and entrepreneurial ways of constituting and imagining éthnos and demos through technological innovations, and (b) conflicts that emerge where efforts to create new infrastructures meet existing ones. Is it possible, we ask, that new constitutionalities are being imagined, practiced, and produced here?

Following conflicts and challenges arising around the implementation of digital infrastructures, we will draw on a mixed-method approach including participatory observations and field notes, minutes of informal conversations, and on-site interviews, as well as netnography, document analyses and expert interviews to conduct fieldwork with actors that fund, conceptualize (i.e. legally/academic/think tanks) and implement digital transformations (phase 1) and local environments where infrastructural imaginaries play out in everyday negotiations, reconfigurations and conflicts (phase 2).

By studying how the central concepts of the study develop in imaginaries tied to digital infrastructures, the project highlights the role of these infrastructures and actors in the formation of community imaginaries, reconfigurations of sovereignty, éthnos and demos.

The project innovates by integrating trans-disciplinary methods, advancing critical knowledge amongst actors of operational practices and by collaborating with NGOs and artistic projects concerned with the socio-cultural effects of new digital infrastructures.