[Commlist] Weizenbaum Conference 2022: Practicing Sovereignty – Interventions for open digital futures

CFP: Weizenbaum Conference 2022: Practicing Sovereignty – Interventions 
for open digital futures

The Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society is organizing its 
2022 annual conference on the subject of “Practicing Sovereignty. 
Interventions for open digital futures”. The international conference 
and exhibition will investigate new opportunities for digital 
participation and policymaking and discuss technological and social 
practices from various fields and disciplines. We frame digital 
sovereignty as a condition of the ability to critically partake in the 
digital transformation.


Introduction

The Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society is organizing its 
2022 annual conference on the subject of “Practicing Sovereignty. 
Interventions for open digital futures” and invites interested scholars 
and artists to submit papers and abstracts for presentations and 
workshops. The conference will take place at the venue „Alte Münze“ in 
Berlin on Thursday, 9 June and Friday, 10 June 2022.

The premises of how ICT impacts societies worldwide have changed. 
Instead of further indulging in collective imaginaries of better, 
digitally ediated futures, today’s narratives are dominated by worrying 
aspects of the digital transformation. Issues such as the increasing 
vulnerability and manipulation of individuals, the violation of 
fundamental rights through mass surveillance, and the digitally mediated 
undermining of democratic institutions and practices have become more 
and more threatening to an open and free society.

Against this backdrop, the notion of “digital sovereignty” is currently 
witnessing an increasing interest. Being hotly debated for its implied 
potentials, but also for its shortcomings, the term denotes diverse 
concepts that negotiate competences, duties, and rights in the digital 
age. Questions of trust, confidence, and competence – intensified by the 
COVID-19 pandemic – contextualize digital sovereignty in a fundamental 
reconsideration of what has been known as democratic principles, civil 
rights, and national identities.

The international conference and exhibition will investigate new 
opportunities for digital participation and policymaking and discuss 
alternative technological and social practices from various fields and 
disciplines. We frame digital sovereignty as a right to be claimed and a 
process constantly in the making, as a condition of the ability to 
critically partake in the digital transformation.

The conference will provide a transdisciplinary platform for scholars, 
artists, activists, and human rights advocates who develop 
transformative practices spaces to foster digital involvement. 
Grassroots initiatives, community projects, and participatory practices 
in design, art and activism appear as collective counter strategies and 
bottom-up interventions that challenge the normalization of inequalities 
and insecurities and push back against threats to an open society. They 
lay the groundwork for new forms of agency, paving novel ways of 
practicing sovereignty – both in the sense of collective activities as 
well as in terms of public education and experimentation.

To investigate the notion of digital sovereignty while respecting the 
plurality of its notion and approaches, the conference and exhibition 
offer four different tracks with shifting focuses:
1) Digital sovereignty: terms, concepts, limitations
2) Datafication and democracy
3) Digital literacies and inequalities
4) Digital sovereignty and scientific autonomy


1. Digital sovereignty: terms, concepts, limitations

As a central concept in current policy discourses, digital sovereignty 
addresses various challenges posed by the digital transformation. This 
track will address theoretical approaches in the current discourses on 
regulatory, technological, and civil society perspectives on digital 
sovereignty, and discuss approaches that are being negotiated. They 
range from a territorial viewpoint for digitally sovereign entities to 
an individual perspective of self-determination in everyday life and 
touch upon questions of autonomy, control, and authority. Contributions 
may include but are not limited to:
- Different (digital) ontologies and corresponding notions of sovereignty
- Relations between sovereignty and the digital
- Conceptual elements of how to analyze (digital) sovereignty
- Shifting power systems through the digital transformation of societies
- Public reflections of sovereign powers
- Alternative sovereignty concepts for democratic value


2. Datafication and democracy

How can we reimagine the politics of data? Automated decision-making, 
predictive policing, social scoring – computational datafication and 
automation are changing structures and procedures not only of private 
corporations but also of governments and public institutions. At the 
same time, people\s everyday lives become datafied lives. Digital means 
and tools empower them to demand access to government information 
(freedom of information, open government) and to actively partake in 
political decision-making. But they also burden citizens with 
responsibility: It is often up to the individual to resist and protest 
the collection and exploitation of their personal data by private 
corporations and intelligence agencies. With these new challenges and 
possibilities, liberal democracies seem to be at a crossroads: Are 
people becoming a mere datapoint in an opaque machinery of computation 
whose results and decisions we can neither comprehend nor challenge? Or 
can we, by new means of engagement and by redefining technical 
infrastructures as public infrastructures, strengthen democracy and 
advance social progress? Contributions may include but are not limited to:
- Changing structures in governments and public institutions through    
datafication
- Open government, open data, open source
- Public interest design
- Surveillance capitalism: data extractivism and the quantification of 
the individual
- Automated decision making vs. digitally aided sovereignty
- Ownership of digital infrastructure: private property and the public 
sphere


3. Digital literacies and inequalities

How can we grasp and trace the interrelations between social 
inequalities and digital divides? How can we develop new strategies for 
socio-technical public education that ensure equitable and democratic 
engagements with regulatory debates around technologies? Through the 
lens of a so called “third level digital divide” – a concept that 
addresses the capacity to achieve adequate outcomes and benefits from 
our digital actions – we can look beyond simplistic conceptions of 
access to technologies and information. This track will discuss digital 
literacies in a broader, socio-cultural sense as a creative, 
performative, and inherently political everyday practice and thus use 
digitality as a lens to discuss intersectional inequalities. With this, 
it will examine both the causes and consequences of power, privilege, 
and oppression in the digital realm, and feature theories, practices and 
tactics for addressing and countering the increasing amount of digital 
inequalities and disparities on a global level. Contributions may 
include but are not limited to:
- Digitalization and gender and intersectionality
- Gender-equitable design of digital or socio-technical systems
- In/visibility of oppressive forces in digital algorithms and products
- New strategies for socio-technical public education and public pedagogy
- Art, technology and exploit: exposing power inequalities through 
artistic practice
- Digital activism as digital empowerment of groups and individuals


4. Digital sovereignty and scientific autonomy

The digital transformation of scientific work comes with promises of 
faster collaboration, increased rigour and broader access to knowledge. 
At the heart of these scientific imaginaries are new digital 
infrastructures that connect researchers, organizations, and artifacts. 
However, today an increasing number of these infrastructures are 
developed and controlled by a handful of powerful technology firms and 
publishing companies. This development poses a threat to scientific 
autonomy, as such crucial infrastructures are shaped by the data 
imperative and extractive logics of platform capitalism rather than the 
needs of the scientific community. To contribute to the project of 
digital sovereignty, science needs to reclaim its autonomy in digitally 
networked environments first. The goal of this conference track is to 
bring together critical perspectives and generative proposals on the 
crisis of scientific autonomy in the digital condition. Contributions 
may include but are not limited to:
- Data repositories and preprint servers
- Tracking technologies and academic surveillance
- Predatory publishing
- Open science and open education
- Distributed trust technologies in science
- Digital metrics and evaluation tools


Submission Categories:

Papers

Paper length should be between 2,500 and 3,000 words (including notes, 
excluding references) and follow the Word template formatting. When 
using LaTeX, please adapt the formatting of the Word template. Please 
upload the paper in PDF format. As the paper will be reviewed in a 
double-blind process, please anonymize any information which could point 
to your authorship (including information in references and notes). 
Papers accepted in the review or revision process will be published as 
part of the conference proceedings. In addition, selected submissions 
will be given the opportunity to be published in a special issue of the 
Weizenbaum Journal of the Digital Society 
(https://ojs.weizenbaum-institut.de/index.php/wjds/index 
<https://ojs.weizenbaum-institut.de/index.php/wjds/index>) that will 
focus on the conference topics. Authors are expected to hold a 20-minute 
presentation of their submitted papers.
Authors are expected to hold a 20-minute presentation of their submitted 
papers.

Proposals for workshops and project presentation

The conference will provide space for workshops and project 
presentations in fields of scientific research and also for artistic 
research and projects, activism/hacktivism, design, or other interactive 
or participatory formats. Please submit a project proposal as PDF (max. 
3 pages) including a description (max. 1,000 words) and, if applicable, 
images. If the proposal includes video or audio material, please provide 
within the pdf hyperlinks to a video/audio hosting platform where the 
work can be accessed (e.g., Vimeo or platforms of educational 
institutions). The review process will be single-blind and include 
suggestions for revision considering the conditions of the conference 
site and schedule. The description will be published in the conference 
proceedings (a selection of descriptions also in the Weizenbaum Journal, 
s. above), combined with images and potential documentation material 
(depending on the individual project and to be discussed with the 
contributor).


Procedures:

1) Please submit a paper or abstract for workshop and project 
presentation by 15 February 2022 via Easy Chair 
(https://easychair.org/account/signin_timeout?l=kLXLKooTH1U8znHsHhk8Ed# 
<https://easychair.org/account/signin_timeout?l=kLXLKooTH1U8znHsHhk8Ed#>). 
The paper or abstract should indicate the conference track.
2) Submissions will be reviewed, and decisions of acceptance will be 
issued by 15 March 2022. Peer review of papers (double-blind) and 
abstract for workshop and project presentation (single-blind). Decisions 
of acceptance or revision will be issued by 15 March 2022.
3) After the potential revision the papers will be published in the 
conference proceedings. The conference proceedings will be published 
open access by the Weizenbaum Institute (providing DOIs). In addition, 
selected submissions will be given the opportunity to be published in a 
special issue of the Weizenbaum Journal of the Digital Society that will 
focus on the conference topics.


Contact information:
(conference /at/ weizenbaum-institut.de) <mailto:(conference /at/ weizenbaum-institut.de)>
www.weizenbaum-institut.de <http://www.weizenbaum-institut.de>
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