Call for Position Papers — 2nd INFRASTRUCTURE Workshop

Workshop Announcement

In the geopolitical race for technological hegemony, regimes are using digital sovereignty policies to enact control and grow their own digital economy. A central element of these industrial policies is the creation of an enabling environment for infrastructural expansion: targeted investment in the technology sector, deprioritization of environmental and social protection, and creation of new electricity infrastructures are all meant to underwrite the build-out of submarine cables, data centres, telecommunication infrastructures, and satellite constellations.

Infrastructure space itself becomes a medium of statecraft (Easterling 2014), where power is reconfigured through design, finance, technology, and circulation. The world becomes ever further enmeshed in a circulation complex that both encases nature and society for generations to come.

In this workshop, circulation offers a lens to understand both the workings of the entire market and its relation to that of specific industries (Kjøsen 2018). It allows for theorization about how the externalisation of costs, regulatory capture, corporate power, and the generation of financial power propels infrastructural expansion outward and downward, from the seabed to low earth orbit.

Topics of Interest

We are interested in thinking through the consequences of the increasing private ownership of expanding communication infrastructure from the sea to the sky and methods of measuring it. We attend to the territories, people, natural resources, and environments being sacrificed in the name of progress, economic growth, and control (Mollen et al. 2026), the violence that circulation and logistics carry with them (Cowen 2014), and critical quantitative and qualitative methods to foreground underpinning patterns.

We welcome contributions that bring network measurement, systems design, and security research into contact with political economy and critical theory, alongside work that asks how people engage with and contest these configurations.

Themes

Sea, land, and sky as infrastructural frontiers: submarine cables, terrestrial data centres, and low-orbit satellite constellations as sites of expansion, and how the three domains are being knitted into a single circulation complex.
Infrastructure as asset class: the financialisation of connectivity and computation; firms as financial instruments and infrastructures as investment objects; venture capital, private equity, and the conditions of public listings.
Externalisation and its costs: the environmental, territorial, and labour costs displaced onto people, ecologies, and resources; energy and water demand, mineral extraction, and land use; regulatory capture and algorithmic control as mechanisms of cost-shifting.
Digital sovereignty as industrial policy: state investment, deregulation, and subsidy regimes that build an enabling environment for expansion; the US-China race for technological hegemony and its peripheries.
Circulation as concept and method: theoretical and empirical engagements with circulation (Kjøsen 2018; Dyer-Witheford and Mularoni 2025); the circuit linking labour, data, advertising, logistics, and the production of desire.
Logistics, ownership, and the state: logistical power and the violence of global trade (Cowen 2014); shifting ownership structures across cables, data centres, and satellites; public, private, and hybrid arrangements.
The stack as a site of power: routing and peering, protocol standards, autonomous systems, and default configurations as the places where ownership and control are quietly enacted.
Counter-infrastructures and building otherwise: how engineers, communities, and publics contest, repair, and reimagine these systems; commons-based, federated, and decentralised architectures.

Submission

We are looking for short position papers of about 3 pages (maximum 1500 words) that engage with infrastructural expansion and circulation. A position paper outlines a stance on a particular issue or topic and provides arguments and evidence to support this view.

There will be no formal presentation of the papers, but they will shape the agenda and the discussion. Following the workshop, we will discuss the possibility of a joint publication.

Submit your position papers as PDF by sending it attached to an email to submission@criticalinfralab.net with the subject line [sea|land|sky] paper title

Important Dates

15 September 2026 – Short position paper submission deadline
1 November 2026 – Notification of acceptance
28–29 January 2027 – Workshop (Amsterdam)

References

Cowen, D. (2014). The deadly life of logistics: Mapping violence in global trade. University of Minnesota Press.
Dyer-Witheford, N., & Mularoni, A. (2025). Cybernetic circulation complex: Big tech and planetary crisis. Verso.
Easterling, K. (2014). Extrastatecraft: The power of infrastructure space. Verso.
Kjøsen, A. M. (2018). Circulation. In A. Pendakis, I. Szeman, & J. Diamanti (Eds.), The Bloomsbury companion to Marx (pp. 281–288). Bloomsbury Academic.
Mollen, A., Jansen, F., Kannengießer, S., & Velkova, J. (2026). AI infrastructures and sustainability: Expanding perspectives on automation, communication and media. Springer.
Steinhoff, J., Kjøsen, A. M., & Dyer-Witheford, N. (2024). Stagnation, circulation, and the automated abyss. In J. Fehrle, M. Lieber, & J. J. Ramirez (Eds.), (De)Automating the future: Marxist perspectives on capitalism and technology (pp. 288–310). Brill.