Short Abstract

This panel explores how data infrastructures govern the polity by automating information, inviting work on assemblage thinking, infrastructural inversion, and participatory approaches to studying citizenship, sovereignty, and inequality.

Description

Digital infrastructures increasingly govern society by automating the production, circulation, and interpretation of information. From biometric identification to digital identity systems and health technologies, such regulatory data infrastructures shape how citizenship, sovereignty, and inequality are exercised and experienced. They translate governance into code, and in doing so, redefine relations between states, markets, and citizens. What happens to the state, when regulatory functions are increasingly taken up by private-owned infrastructures? How is this power-shift shaping the future of liberal democracies?

This panel invites contributions that explore these transformations through the lens of Science and Technology Studies and neighbouring disciplines, foregrounding infrastructures as socio-technical assemblages and sites of power. In resonance with the EASST 2026 theme “More-than-now”, the panel looks beyond immediate technological debates to examine how data infrastructures prefigure possible futures of democracy and governance. We invite interventions that address the dynamics, politics, affects and methods of studying governance by data infrastructure—including assemblage thinking, infrastructural inversion, and participatory approaches to complex research ecologies.

We particularly welcome contributions that cross disciplinary, sectoral, and geographical boundaries, especially those drawing on non-Western and comparative perspectives. Topics may include: citizenship and digital agency, data sovereignty and technocratic expertise, infrastructures of inequality, biometric and health technologies, and emerging modes of algorithmic governance.

This panel would ideally be complemented by a workshop extending the panel’s focus on the study of regulatory data infrastructures. As a starting point, the convenors will briefly introduce participatory walkshops as an example of infrastructural inversion in practice. From there, participants will be invited to a guided exchange about their own methodologies and to explore how these might connect within a broader research assemblage of regulatory data infrastructures. The session aims to identify overlaps, complementarities, and potential collaborations among approaches. Practical requirements: seminar-style room (maximum 25 participants), movable chairs, wall space for notes and visual material, and a projector.

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