Post-pandemic recovery plans in the EU and the UK involve an unprecedented expansion of digital infrastructures that promise to strengthen the resilience and sovereignty of the European Union and ‘upgrade’ the UK respectively. These new technologies will be part of the social fabric of everyday life and will be invested with new meanings and imaginations. “The Social Life of XG” (SoLiXG) explores infrastructural imaginaries in relation to ideas of community, borders and sovereignty.
In his seminal work on imagined communities, Benedict Anderson has shown how the technologies of printing have promoted notions of communities as nations, as sovereign and as bounded entities. We ask: What technologies form the basis of notions of community in the contemporary? Based on the point that today’s technological infrastructures are rapidly changing and in need of constant renewal, we observe that with the introduction of fifth generation (5G) technology standards, the generational shift to »6G« and »7G« is already on the horizon. Our acronym »XG« therefore stands to indicate the changing nature of today’s technology.
Three questions guide our research:
- a) What infrastructural imaginaries shape the processes of digital transformation?
- b) How do material infrastructures of “XG” encounter challenges or conflicts in local environments; how do they change everyday practices and discourses?
- c) What alternative infrastructural imaginaries can we identify in thought and practice, and how do they enable different notions of sovereignty and community?
To understand how new technologies are involved in shaping new communities, new notions of boundaries and sovereignty, this project explores notions of XG in different dimensions: a) at the level of institutional and policy frameworks; b) among technology developers such as telecommunications companies and innovation centres; and c) in local environments that we expect to be strongly affected by digital transformation, in neighbourhoods, workplaces or health services. SoLiXG considers these issues as questions of socio-cultural change in order to understand how XG, and the ideas associated with it, attain social life. We bring together perspectives from migration and cultural studies, political science, sociology and queer feminist technoscience from the EU and the UK, as well as a range of partners working on the materiality of infrastructures, emancipatory applications of technology or the development of digital infrastructures.
KEYWORDS:
digital infrastructures, infrastructural imaginaries, imagined communities, digital sovereignty, nationalism borders,
CONSORTIUM
- Project Leader: Manuela Bojadžijev, Humboldt-University Berlin, Institute for European Ethnology, Germany, e-mail
- Roland Atzmüller, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Department for the Theory of Society and Social Analyses, Austria
- Helen V. Pritchard, University of Plymouth, iDAT, (Arts, Design, Architecture, United Kingdom
- Stefan Jonsson, Professor, Linköping University, Department of Culture and Society, IKOS, Sweden
COOPERATION PARTERS
- Magnus Frodigh, Ericsson Research,Ericsson AB
- Femke Snelting, The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest
- Prof. Dr. Philipp Misselwitz, Bauhaus der Erde
EFFECTS & ACHIEVEMENTS
Project achievements:
Background
In a time of global conflicts and instability, digital technologies are increasingly constructed as infrastructure for national security, as safeguards against crises and catastrophes, and for ‘digital’ or ‘technological’ sovereignty. The EU invests heavily in developing telecommunications standards and patents, maintaining independent cloudservices and securing supply chains for microchips – all in order to become “a more digital and more resilient Europe”, according to the European Commission.
As designing, maintaining and expanding digital infrastructure becomes an indispensable geopolitical and geoeconomic strategy, it elicits important questions about the emerging relationship between technological transformations and sovereignty, community and belonging in Europe.
Purpose and Objectives
“The Social Life of XG” undertakes exploratory research to find out how this technological transformation reconstitutes sovereignty and political communities – in thought and in practice. Who is imagined to be sovereign? Who are the imagined subjects of digital sovereignty? What technological, economical and political projects are part of Europe’s digital sovereignty initiative? And how does digital sovereignty “hit the ground”?
Methodology
To address these questions, SoLiXG investigated the imaginaries of sovereignty and digital infrastructure in an interdisciplinary team spanning sociology, political science, cultural anthropology, migration studies and queer technoscience. Projects of European digital sovereignty were researched on (1) the level of EU-Policy, (2) the level of infrastructural development and (3) the local level of implementation. The research synthesizes insights from policy-analyses of funding frameworks, from expert interviews with technology developers and industry insiders, and from fine-grained ethnographic fieldwork in sites of intervention – from Gigafactories to Semiconductor-Fabs.
Key Findings and Impact
“Digital Sovereignty” is a contradictory buzzword. Its policies frequently stand in contrast to the material realities of digital infrastructures and the contexts in which they evolve. The attainment of the so-called ‘twin transition’, ‘digital sovereignty’ or ‘resilience’ is often in conflict with value-chain constraints.
Placing European sovereignty in a historical context highlights how the EU attempts to position Europe within a broader geopolitical landscape, seeking to exert control over critical infrastructures and extending its influence to the Global South.
The entrenchments of “technosolutionist” and “technodeterminist” notions of the digital transformation, manifest in actors in the fields, can enable hermetic forms of social consensus. This consensus is based on the governmental rationality to solve social problems through technological change, uphold social cohesion and communities, and secure the geopolitical position of the EU. Crises such as climate change, or the frequently contradictory social effects of digitalisation processes and the realities of digital infrastructures, are shielded from critique and protest.
The democratic character of the technological imaginary is under threat. To challenge this, new imaginaries for popular participation in digital transformations need to be explored. This includes collective practices for “sovereignty otherwise” through crossdisciplinary knowledge exchange among diverse actors concerned with the societal impacts of computational infrastructures on collective life. It can also include countercloud imaginaries or the strengthening of notion such as “public interest” in the development, implementation or even the cessation of digital infrastructure.
Publications:
- Pritchard H. V., Britton L., For Careful Slugs: Caring for Unknowing in CS (Computer Science), http://dx.doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v8i2.37723
- Alexander H., Bareiter C., Eckhardt D., Digital Truth Making: Anthropological Perspectives on Right-wing Politics and Social Media in “Post-truth” Societies, Ethnologie Europaea, 2023, https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/ethnologia-europaea/53/2/ee530201.xml
- Mauricio R., ‘Rescuing Europe’ and ‘balancing powers’ A postcolonial critique of European digital sovereignty, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2024
- Atzmüller R., Egger L., Pillinger A., Digitalisierung als Krisenbearbeitung? Die ‚digitale Wende‘ der EU-Politik am Beispiel des NGEU-Wiederaufbauplans, Basel: Scheinsubjekt Digitalisierung – Akteurszentrierte Analysen der Arbeit 4.0., 2024
- Atzmüller, R., Egger, L., Pillinger, A., Digitalisation as Crisis Management? The Digital Turn of EU Policy Using the Example of the NGEU Recovery Plan, Scheinsubjekt Digitalisierung Politische Ökonomie der Arbeit 4.0, 2025, https://www.beltz.de/fachmedien/soziologie/produkte/details/55086-scheinsubjekt-digitalisierung.html
- Egger, L., Pillinger, A., Crisis Management through Digitalisation? The European Digitalisation Strategy in the Twin Transition, Kurswechsel, 2024, https://www.beigewum.at/kurswechsel-2-2024/
- Bojadžijev, M., Altenried, M., Wallis, M., Platform Mobilities: Migration and Digital Labor, Sage Handbook of Digital Labour, 2025, https://www.beck-shop.de/bulut-chen-grohmann-jarrett-sage-handbook-of-digital-labour/product/39824441?srsltid=AfmBOormFKVNaqqfRTLdCq4V_OEg359wWX0PlsuIFXpvrbrCXg_qSpU7
- Rogat, M., Rescuing Europe and Balancing Powers: A Postcolonial Critique of European Digital Sovereignty, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758251356752
- Bojadžijev, M., Harder, A., Vom Netzwerk zum Stapel. Neue Bilder für die ethnographische Erforschung des Digitalen, Berliner Blätter, vol. 92, 2025
- Pritchard, H. V., Moss, M., Gustafsson, D., Zapico, J., Snodgrass, E., Windternet: Designing Grid-Liberated Servers for Regenerative Energy Communities, LIMITS, 2024, https://computingwithinlimits.org/2024/papers/limits2024-snodgrass-windternet.pdf
- Pritchard, H. V., Snelting, F., Gürses, S., Rocha, J., Aouragh, M., We Are Tectonic! A Queer Geophysics for Intra-Solidarities and Resisting the Cloud Regime, The Venice Journal of Environmental Humanities, vol. 5(1), 2025, https://doi.org/10.30687/lgsp/2785-2709/2025/01/008
- Pritchard, H. V., Snelting, F., Transitional Infrastructures, 2025
- Pritchard, H. V., Snelting, F., Bugreporting on Anticipatory Infra-Solutionism: Collective Practices of Struggle and Resistance, Digital Geography and Society, 2025
- Atzmüller, R., Egger, L., Pillinger, A., Decieux, F., Grbic, L., Robustness through Smartness: The Imaginary of Resilience as a Field of Contestation and Consensus within the EU’s Digital Policy, in: Digital Infrastructures and Imaginations of Sovereignty in Europe, Bristol UP, 2025
- Rogat, M., Koefoed, M., Northvolt and the National Imaginary of the North: Geopolitics, Populations, and the Historical Echoes of Sweden’s Northern Industrialisation, in: Digital Infrastructures and Imaginations of Sovereignty in Europe, Bristol UP, 2025
- Krifors, K., Interoperability in the EU: The Political Aesthetics of Systems In-Becoming, in: Digital Infrastructures and Imaginations of Sovereignty in Europe, Bristol UP, 2025
- Harder, A., Völker, M., Albrecht, G., When Geo-Economics Hit the Ground: Semiconductor Fabrication in Silicon Saxony, in: Digital Infrastructures and Imaginations of Sovereignty in Europe, Bristol UP, 2025
- Harder, A., Sovereignty without Subjects? Infrastructural Imaginaries in the Development of 6G Telecommunication Standards, in: Digital Infrastructures and Imaginations of Sovereignty in Europe, Bristol UP, 2025
- Atzmüller, R., Egger, L., Pillinger, A., Decieux, F., Grbic, L., Market-Centric Reconfiguration of Sovereignty: Diversification and Public Investment, in: Digital Infrastructures and Imaginations of Sovereignty in Europe, Bristol UP, 2025
- West, K., The Place of Culture in the Project of Digital Sovereignty in the EU, in: Digital Infrastructures and Imaginations of Sovereignty in Europe, Bristol UP, 2025
- Bojadžijev, M., Jonsson, S., In the Digital Age: Ethnos, Demos, Xenos, in: Digital Infrastructures and Imaginations of Sovereignty in Europe, Bristol UP, 2025
- Pritchard, H. V., Snelting, F., Gürses, S., Rocha, J., Aouragh, M., Cloud Contestations and Scenes of Transitional Infrastructures, in: Digital Infrastructures and Imaginations of Sovereignty in Europe, Bristol UP, 2025
- Bojadžijev, M., Rossiter, N., EU AI Borders, in: Digital Infrastructures and Imaginations of Sovereignty in Europe, Bristol UP, 2025
- Harder, A., Altenried, M., Searching for Silicon Saxony: The Everyday Geopolitics of Semiconductor Fabrication in Eastern Germany, 2025
Start date
1 November 2022
Project duration
36 months
Project budget
€ 1 499 931
Funding organisations
