[acc-cca-l] CFP Digital sovereignty in the age of technopowers - 4S Toronto October 2026

[Sophie Toupin]

[△EXTERNAL]



Cher.e.s collègues, Dear colleagues,

Nous vous invitons à soumettre votre proposition à notre table ronde lors du congrès 4S.
Please consider submitting to our open panel at 4S.

Digital sovereignty in the age of technopowers: New understandings and methods of study within STS
4S Toronto October 2026

Sophie Toupin, Université Laval
Stéphane Couture, Université de Montréal
Ksenia Ermoshina, Center for Internet and Society CNRS
Riccardo Nanni, CNRS.

Digital sovereignty (DS) has long been examined as a research object across academia, civil society, Indigenous scholarship, and policy arenas, giving rise to a turn across multiple disciplines (Couture & Toupin, 2019; Grohmann & Costa Barbosa, 2025; Kukutai & Taylor, 2016; Pohle & Thiel, 2020). In the current geopolitical context marked by the beginning of Trump’s second term as President of the USA, the technopower alignment between the USA government, Big Tech, and AI industry, and the race toward AI supremacy against China, new conceptual frameworks, theories, and methodological approaches to the study of digital sovereignty are needed.
Contributions and additional details:
This Traditional Open Panel invites contributions that are topically, theoretically, and methodologically related to DS and related terms, but not limited to research that addresses the following:
- Emerging theorization and methods to understand and conceptualize DS especially from STS perspectives and from multiple geography.
- Inquiring into DS from underexamined perspectives including its material conditions (such as access to territory and resources, imperialist or settler-colonial land grab and the construction of data centers) and the humans involved (such as the data annotators as in the case of AI sovereignty).
 - Resistance to or through DS coming from different actors.
This open panel contributes to the field of STS, and to this conference more specifically, by resituating digital sovereignty as a problem of technopower, produced through infrastructure, capital, governance, and knowledge practices, among others. It foregrounds conceptual and methodological approaches to examine how digital sovereignty is mobilized, instrumentalized, contested, and redefined by states, corporations, civil society, and Indigenous peoples. By showing how these struggles shape technoscientific futures rather than merely responding to them, the Traditional Open Panel advances grounded, justice-oriented STS analyses and positions digital sovereignty as a site of methodological inquiry and political intervention.


Deadline: 30 April 2026

Submissions:

https://www.4sonline.org/call_for_submissions_toronto.php

Contact:

Sophie Toupin, Université Laval, sophie.toupin at com.ulaval.ca









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