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Short abstract

Focusiung on Pakistan's cash transfers program, this paper investigates how women beneficiaries navigate an unstable infrastructural assemblage of databases, digital technologies, officials and (non-)state functionaries, and hygienic regimes to enact their new relationship with the state

Long abstract

States across the Global South have increasingly sought to automate welfare by relying on data-based infrastructures and digital technologies. Hence, by fixing identities beyond the flimsy paper-based identification systems and by establishing systems that work as objective and standardized procedures these infrastructures are supposed to expand citizenship rights vis-à-vis the state. Focusing on Pakistani state’s social protection program, the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) – also known as the Ehsaas Kafalat [Compassionate Guardianship] Programme (EKP) – this paper investigates the contradictory politics of such data-driven and digital infrastructures to show how they encourage and undermine, valorize and devalue certain imaginaries of, and engagements with the state. Introduced in 2008, its official goals were poverty reduction and women empowerment: women, representing the poorer households, are Programme’s primary beneficiaries. To overcome leakages, improve transparency and the problems of human (political and bureaucratic) mediation and discretion, the Programme has come to increasingly rely on digitally-conducted surveys and on biometric verifications. Thanks to the largely favorable evaluations by the powerful international organizations, it has expanded exponentially even as four different governments have changed hands in the national capital: with less than two million beneficiaries in 2008 to over eight million beneficiaries today. By employing assemblage perspective, this paper argues that from the standpoint of the everyday experiences of women beneficiaries the Programme functions as a contingent and unstable entanglement of beneficiary claimants, databases, digital, biometric verification devices, state- and non-state functionaries, internet and electricity connections, hygienic regimes and even dust and sweat.

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Short abstract

This paper examines how AI in healthcare governs not only bodies and data, but also emotions. Drawing on STS and affect theory, it argues that AI-mediated health technologies codify and circulate emotional norms by translating feeling rules into computational forms of affective regulation.

Long abstract

AI applications in the health sector increasingly operate as regulatory devices that govern not only bodies and data, but also feelings. As AI is applied in diagnostic and therapeutic practices, the management of emotions itself becomes being automated and standardized. This contribution examines how these AI devices enact new modes of governance by translating psychological concepts, societal norms and expectations of emotional behavior into technical design. Through this translation, I argue “feeling rules” (Hochschild 1979) representing prevailing expectations of appropriate emotions are recast as computational logics seeking to stabilize social order through emotional regulation. Drawing on STS and affect theory, this contribution conceptualizes AI based health applications as socio technical assemblages of affective regulation. Diagnostic algorithms categorize emotional states, while therapeutic chatbots model empathy, resilience and self care as measurable and optimizable behaviors. These systems extend governance into the emotional domain, aligning well-being and social stability with predictive analytics and automated care. Based on empirical material and a comparative perspective on Germany and Japan, the paper analyzes how AI-mediated health technologies codify and govern emotions across different sociotechnical and cultural contexts. It discusses if the promise of digitized care gives rise to new forms of emotional and affective governance, situating citizens within algorithmic regimes of feeling and broader projects of social order, technological rationality, and the governance of democratic life.

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Short abstract

Exploring the political rationality of digital sovereignty, we argue that its (geo)politics are animated by a technopolitical rationality distinct from previous forms of power. By theorizing this rationality, we propose a new conceptual framework for thinking the politics of digital sovereignty.

Long abstract

As digital sovereignty discourse gains prominence in international geopolitics, scholars struggle with its significant ambiguity. To aid theorization and policy, this paper aims to clarify the political rationality of digital sovereignty. At first, a Foucauldian perspective seems to confirm the political ambiguity of digital sovereignty, as policy in this domain tends to mobilize techniques attributable not merely to political sovereignty but also to discipline and biopolitical security. However, as we show, a unifying tendency can be identified across discourses of digital sovereignty whereby technology consistently replaces the human as the primary object of politics. Based on this observation and drawing on examples from US, Chinese, and European policy, we trace the particular technopolitical rationality underlying the international digital sovereignty agenda. This emergent rationality, we argue, signals an under-researched international political convergence towards a techno-centric form of politics distinct from traditional forms of sovereignty, discipline, and biopolitical security (even if selectively drawing on their techniques). As for its object, this kind of technopolitics focuses on so-called “general-purpose technologies” viewed as simultaneously foundational, enabling, and constraining devices. Its rationality, then, focuses on strategically enabling and controlling widespread techno-social transformation(s) while avoiding undesirable technical constraints. Finally, its distinctive techniques center on forms of interventionist planning aimed at cultivating techno-centric “ecosystems” through which materials and socioeconomic activities can be extracted and directed towards governments’ strategic technological goals. This theory of technopolitics, we argue, equips us with a novel conceptual vocabulary to think through the politics of digital sovereignty across both research and policy.

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Short abstract

This contribution examines the European Digital Identity Wallet as an emerging regulatory infrastructure. It asks how civil society organisations influence its development and why some are more successful than others, comparing digital rights organisations and migrant organisations.

Long abstract

The European Digital Identity Wallet (EUDIW) is reorganizing access to public and private services across the EU, reconfiguring relations between states, citizens, and private firms. We approach this development as a case of governance by information infrastructure.

The EUDIW is a particularly instructive case, because it is still in the making. Unlike established infrastructures, which fade into the background, its technical, legal, and organizational aspects are actively negotiated in social arenas where actors aim to influence an emerging digital infrastructure and the power relations it stabilizes.

We ask: How do civil society organisations attempt to influence the development of the EUDIW, and why are some more successful than others? We combine sociological field theory with STS perspectives to conceptualize the Wallet’s development as a socio-technical field with unequal distributions of capital, including social networks, technical expertise, and financial resources. Empirically, we use expert interviews and document analysis to compare digital rights organizations and migrant organizations.

We find that EU institutions, state actors, and technical experts exert direct influence on EUDIW development through participation in regulatory and standardization committees. Civil society organisations, by contrast, intervene from marginal positions and struggle to exert influence. However, while digital rights organizations can mobilize technical fluency and network proximity to articulate their concerns, migrant organizations remain excluded from design decisions despite being disproportionately affected.

By analysing the EUDIW as a contested innovation field, we show how influence over emerging regulatory infrastructures depends on organisational positioning and the capacity to translate concerns into design choices.

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Short abstract

With a knowledge co-creation approach, we empirically observe the technopolitics of Malaysian bureaucrats operationalising their government's path towards an 'AI-nation'; negotiating contradictions between sovereignty, democracy, and Big Tech's infrastructural AI assemblages in local government.

Long abstract

Against the backdrop of the global expansion of data centre infrastructure for artificial intelligence (AI), Malaysia's government announced its ambition to become a so-called 'AI-nation' by 2030. Couched in a narrative of billion-dollar direct investments by Big Tech companies for the country to become 'Southeast Asia's data centre’, AI has become central to imagining Malaysia's future – and its position in delicate regional geopolitics marked by the chip wars.

While deploying AI into all aspects of Malaysian government activity is presented as ‘without alternative’, the details of this transformation are left undefined. The work of stitching together the government’s AI future with more mundane practices, infrastructures, and public service systems is thus mostly left to bureaucrats.

This paper empirically examines the technopolitics of governmental AI through these bureaucrats’ work of making Malaysia’s government fit into a global infrastructural AI assemblage. Based on a knowledge co-creation approach with selected ministries, we observe them assembling partially coherent rationales for AI applications; glossing over contradictions between sovereignty, democracy, and Big Tech solutions; negotiating and resisting the risks of governing with AI.

We then argue that this mundane work of operationalising AI into the everyday functions of state institutions is far from mundane: It is where a global infrastructural AI assemblage territorialises novel forms of government, subjectivities, and exclusions; and it is where localised infrastructures enact geopolitics. Studying and reflecting these practices in the majority world thus holds the potential to not only nuance, but re-imagine, decolonise, or resist Western imaginaries of AI futures.

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Short abstract

This paper analyses the infrastructuring involved in digital identification systems in a developing context like Togo in West Africa. This complex socio-technical system, which consists of open-source DPIs, state, and corporate actors, makes the citizen-resident legible by the state.

Long abstract

The identification of the citizens of a state has been a historical infrastructural act that materializes development agendas, the state-resident relationship, and questions of control and accountability (Szreter, 2007). Research has established an undeniable link between development and digital ID systems; inclusive, universal coverage can lead to a robust interface between citizens and other institutions including the government, public service providers, employers, and other commercial actors (Gelb, 2000; Gelb & Metz, 2018; White et al., 2019). Even so, Masiero and Bailur (2021) challenge this development rhetoric by highlighting the grave consequences of exclusionary digital ID systems that are, nonetheless, imagined to be a frictionless process of registration. Exclusion is compounded by existing social disadvantages; beyond issues of access to internet infrastructures, scholars have been concerned with datafied negative perception, and exclusion through design practices (Fernandes Da Silva Ranchordas, 2022; Park & Humphry, 2019).

In this paper, we take the case of the deployment of the identification Digital Public Infrastructure, Modular Open-Source Identity Platform (MOSIP) and its collaboration with Atos and IDEMIA, to identify the actor-infrastructure and how it intersects with the social realities of Togo. The Togolese government manages a historically challenged socio-economic context with different forms of inequalities. Our research question is: Which design choices (architecture & governance) structure the Togo e-ID and how do they impact the legibility of the citizen according to the state? Through a technographical approach, we position the e-ID infrastructure as a socio-technical system that constructs the neoliberal citizen through technical & architectural choices.

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Short abstract

This paper describes an investigative arts and justice-centred approach exploring the impacts of the emerging technology, Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS).

Long abstract

This paper describes an investigative arts and justice-centred approach exploring the impacts of the emerging technology, Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS).

DAS repurposes legacy fibre optic cables (‘dark fibres’) to capture data in the form of environmental vibrations across extended geographies. While DAS infrastructure is currently in use for monitoring seismic activity, railway tracks and pipelines, there are data privacy concerns if this were to extend into a smart city technology.

Investigative arts combines research methodologies and public engagement approaches from both investigative (journalism, open-source intelligence research, data analysis) and artistic disciplines (visual arts, creative workshops, exhibition), to shape radical interrogations to systemic injustices in the public domain.

Applied to research on an emerging technology like DAS, this investigative arts project draws upon critical infrastructure studies, particularly on data justice topics involving climate and militarism. It identifies the speculative local impacts of DAS given its potential deployments by industry. Further, by understanding both the local and global ecology of stakeholders and their intentions with DAS innovations, making connections between the global DAS infrastructure (where Southampton is one node), its supply chain, and grassroots international solidarities is essential in ensuring robust data justice advocacy as the technology expands.

The project seeks to uncover knowledge together with Southampton residents, and an interdisciplinary team across data sciences, social sciences, humanities, and arts at the University of Southampton. A recent citizens’ panel in Southampton and London brought participants to discuss this technology, and highlighted concerns around data and technology governance, privacy and environmental impact.

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The paper examines smartphone bans as infrastructural inversion. Based on participatory research in secondary schools, it asks whether digital disconnection is mere solutionism or can create productive friction that challenges infrastructural entanglement and strengthens public values in education.

Long abstract

Digital infrastructures increasingly govern public sectors as they become indispensable ‘obligatory passage points’. In the public education sector, social media, smartphones, and educational technologies (edtech) are deeply embedded in everyday teaching, communication, and school organisation. While offering pedagogical opportunities, these infrastructures also raise concerns about distraction, dependency, data extraction, and the erosion of public values. In response, governments and educational institutions are introducing partial bans on smartphones and social media in schools.

This paper conceptualises such bans as a possible form of ‘infrastructural inversion’: a figure–ground reversal that renders visible the normally invisible, taken-for-granted operations of entangled socio-technical infrastructures (Simonsen et al., 2020). While current policies of digital disconnection are often no more than a purely technological fix, we examine whether banning data-driven technologies can be a step towards challenging the strategic entanglement of schools’ social infrastructures with corporate-computational infrastructures (Pierson, 2021).

Drawing on qualitative participatory research and in-depth interviews with pupils and teachers in five secondary schools in Flanders (Belgium) in early 2026, we analyse lived experiences of the newly implemented governmental smartphone ban. Our framework integrates insights from Media and Communication Studies, STS, and critical edtech studies, with particular attention to infrastructural inversion and ‘seamfulness’ as the deliberate introduction of boundaries and friction in data flows (Couldry & Mejias, 2019).

We assess whether such friction merely reproduces technological solutionism or whether it can foster responsible digitalisation by enhancing critical awareness, collective governance capabilities, and citizen agency over public values within the data-driven state.

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Short abstract

This presentation examines how interoperable welfare data systems create and recreate citizens as vulnerable subjects. Drawing on ethnographic research, it analyzes the assumptions of infrastructures and how practitioners negotiate epistemic limits in assembling data from multiple domains.

Long abstract

Over the past decade, public organizations have increasingly adopted cross-organizational data sharing to produce new forms of knowledge and governance through interoperable systems. In Sweden, for example, over 95 percent of municipal social services use the interoperability infrastructure SSBTEK/GIF to aggregate data from nearly 20 organizations when assessing welfare applications (SKR, 2019; 2025).

However, interoperability is not a neutral technical achievement but an epistemic and governmental practice that reshapes how subjects and needs become intelligible (Isin & Ruppert, 2020; Koopman, 2019). Data in public organizations is produced within situated institutional practices and classificatory regimes, yet these contexts are often subordinated to standardization and infrastructural integration (Wagenknecht et al., 2024). When data is detached from its contexts of production and translated across domains (Lee & Ribes, 2025; Ribes et al., 2019), interoperability does not simply reveal a subject’s state; it enacts it.

In welfare systems, one such enactment is vulnerability; the conditions in which a subject is deemed in need of government support. Through classificatory infrastructures, "the needy" are reconstituted as administratively legible subjects whose needs, risks, and deservingness are inferred from fragmented data. Some forms of vulnerability are stabilized and made governable, while others become illegible or erased. Interoperability thus functions as a technology of subjectification and epistemic governance, defining what counts as vulnerability and what interventions become possible.

Drawing on ethnographic research across Swedish welfare organizations, this presentation examines the ontological underpinnings of welfare data interoperability, how practitioners negotiate its epistemic limits, and how vulnerable subjects are ultimately assembled.

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Short abstract

Contemporary data infrastructures increasingly detach data representations from social reality. This paper introduces digital identity epistemic fragility to analyse how this detachment emerges and stabilises, drawing on an in-depth empirical study of South Africa’s identity data infrastructure

Long abstract

Contemporary data infrastructures operate as epistemic anchors, mediating how social reality is rendered knowable, actionable, and comparable across organisational and institutional contexts. While growing scholarship has examined bias, discrimination, and opacity in data-driven systems, these concepts insufficiently capture a more subtle and structural transformation: the progressive detachment of data-based representations from the social realities they are meant to describe. This paper introduces digital identity epistemic fragility as a conceptual framework to analyse how such detachment emerges and stabilises within large-scale data infrastructures. The concept is developed through an empirical analysis of South African identity data infrastructures. The empirical analysis draws on over forty semi-structured interviews and informal conversations with government officials, industry representatives, standardisation bodies, and civil society actors, complemented by policy documents, technical standards, patents, and archival material tracing the historical evolution of South Africa’s identity infrastructure. This project first clarifies the conceptual foundations of digital identity epistemic fragility and distinguishes it from adjacent notions such as bias, infrastructural failure, and algorithmic opacity, situating the contribution within the broader tradition of data infrastructure studies. It then outlines how it can be treated as an empirically tractable process through qualitative analyses of data infrastructures, including the tracing of referent displacement across data lifecycles, the reconstruction of infrastructural decision logics, and the examination of how organisational actors interpret and rely upon system outputs over time.