Critical Digital Sovereignties Main MenuCritical Digital SovereigntiesWritings from a CARGC workshop seriesData Embassy: The Myth of National Sovereignty in the Cloudby Stanislav BudnitskyTowards a Relational View of Digital SovereigntyEssay on theorizing sovereignty and digitality as necessarily situated and partial constructionsFear, pleasure, and digital leaks in EgyptEssay on the troubling of bodily and national sovereignty in Egyptian televisionDigesting National SovereigntyInfrastructure as 'public good': The Limits of Local Governance in a Global InternetNotes and Experiments in Audioethnography: Eastern State PenitentiaryExperimental sonic autoethnography of the Eastern State Penitentiary in PhiladelphiaThe Digital Exclosure: Sovereignty According to Islamic StateEssay on ISIS' relationship to media technologies, sovereignty, and the performance of nation-making.Thinking Similarly, Operating DifferentlyAn essay on the divergence between Cuban legal notions of technological sovereignty and the technological practices of Cubans themselves.Digital Sovereignty as Resource PoliticsAboutAbout page for the Critical Digital Sovereingty digital publicationCenter for Advanced Research in Global Communication d2a70118073771ce425d555bf923e0bd7bffbc10
Footnote #2
12020-01-04T19:54:15+00:00Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication d2a70118073771ce425d555bf923e0bd7bffbc1012Footnotes for "Towards a Relational View of Digital Sovereignty," Lauren Bridgesplain2020-01-04T20:07:43+00:00Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication d2a70118073771ce425d555bf923e0bd7bffbc10For a feminist critique of citizenship, see Lister, R. (2003). "What is Citizenship?" In R. Lister & J. Campling (Eds.), Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives (pp. 13–42). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-80253-7_2; For a critical race critique see Román, E. (2010). Citizenship and its exclusions: A classical, constitutional, and critical race critique. New York, N.Y: New York University Press; for a decolonial perspective, see Mignolo, W. D. (2006). "Citizenship, Knowledge, and the Limits of Humanity," American Literary History, 18(2), 312–331. https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajj019; and for a critique of normative inclusion in state-defined citizenship, see Brandzel, A. L. (2016). Against citizenship: The violence of the normative. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press.
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12019-11-25T16:23:09+00:00Towards a Relational View of Digital Sovereignty26Essay on theorizing sovereignty and digitality as necessarily situated and partial constructionsplain2020-03-10T20:17:31+00:00by Lauren Bridges
Does digitality complicate notions of sovereignty? Or does it present a crack in historical conceptions of sovereignty and citizenship? Does data have dominion over us? Under us? Through us? Or have these conceptions always been troubled by feminist, critical race, and decolonial perspectives which throw into chaos any normative claim to citizenship?
Rather than viewing sovereignty as a fixed category that has been disrupted by digital reformations, how can we move towards an understanding of digital sovereignty as situated, partial, relational and always in a process of becoming? Techno-feminists argue for the radical potential in abandoning the desire for ownership or dominion over the digital and instead they advocate the need to focus on our relationship to the digital and seeing our bodies, lives, subjectivities, as always entangled with an ongoing, unfinished, process of digital formation. In this way, the digital affords us a chance to challenge fixed notions, as a way to think through classification systems that have been used as tools of exclusion and oppression.
Reconfiguring historically flawed concepts of citizenship and sovereignty requires a reimagining of “the systems of myth and meanings structuring our imaginations... This is the self feminists must code”. This coding is both a material and semiotic. It is the project of rewriting algorithms and digital standards with a feminist, intersectional, antiracist, and decolonial agenda and to encode digital systems with an alternate cyberfeminist imaginary. This is a process not just of material construction, but a reimagining of technologies that serve us.
Part of this work can be found in the project of feminist servers, which offer both a technical alternative to storing and serving data and applications and an alternate imaginary for digital practices that attend to feminist politics. Feminist servers seek out an alternate narrative based on repair, care, maintenance, equity, and ecological sustainability. Through these alternate imaginaries, one may be able to subvert the dominant systems and open up alternate paths for technological design, policy-making, and political action.
Critical Digital Scholar, Wendy Chun (2006), argues that “we must explore the democratic potential of communications technologies – a potential that stems from our vulnerabilities rather than our control. And we must face and seize freedom with determination rather than fear and alibis.” Techno-feminist activists recognize that it is precisely from these vulnerabilities that emancipatory projects must be conceived. In abandoning desire for dividuated sovereignty over the digital, feminist servers seek strength in vulnerability, to create community-led digital infrastructure projects that reflect the needs of their communities. Feminist servers recognize that technology is gendered, raced, classed, and entangled in long histories of oppression and control. Rather than viewing technology as a finished tool to be applied to complex societal problems, feminist servers offer a radical reimagining of technology as relational, ongoing and unfinished, embodied and situation, and always attending to partial perspectives.
Anarchaserver founded in 2014 by members of post-capitalist, eco-industrial colony, Calafou and THF!. Focuses on leaving/dead/transitional/zombie data.
Kefir.red feminist cooperative of free technologies for activists, human rights defenders, journalists, social organizations, collectives and artists
Systerserver founded in 2002, systerserver focuses on hosting free online services and supports trans-feminists learning how to become system administrators
Vedetas feminist server launched by feminist hackerspace, Marialab, based in Brazil.
