The Social Life of xG. Infrastructural Imaginaries

o Wider research context / theoretical framework The Covid19-Pandemic, and the EUs and UKs post-pandemic recovery plans, are catalysing transformations that characterize the Digital Age. The funding, expansion and maintenance of digital communication technologies are imagined as essential to economic recovery, political sovereignty and social cohesion, as well as to Europe`s future position in the world. SoLixG explores how the creation and expansion of new digital infrastructures in Europe, funded under the European Reconstruction Plan and the UK government, (re)configures notions and practices of democratic sovereignty, collective identities, and practices of bordering. o Hypotheses/research questions /objectives Infrastructural imaginaries are visions for what infrastructures are and do, who they serve and how, what values they embody, and what they make possible (Mattern, 2019). It is in these imaginaries and in the current techno-cultural and infrastructural conditions, where we find potential new notions of community, as well as their collision and friction with existing ones. We pursue two sets of research questions: 1) What are the infrastructural imaginaries harbored by the actors that fund, conceptualize (ie legally/academichink tanks) and implement digital transformations connected to the European quest for digital sovereignty. 2) What conflicts, negotiations and reconfigurations emerge where efforts to create new infrastructures meet existing ones. o Approach/methods Each research team will employ a mixed-method approach, combining expert interviews, semi-structured interviews, and ethnographic fieldwork. Building on and innovating methods of multi-sited ethnography with digital methods we aim to follow conflicts and challenges arising around the implementation of digital infrastructures and draw on a mixed-method approach including participatory observations and field notes, minutes of informal conversations, and on-site interviews, as well as netnography, document analyses and expert interviews. o Level of originality / innovation The project aims at creating new insights in the field of infrastructural studies in relation to the complexities of imaginaries of sovereignty, imagined communities and new constitutionalities by investigating the social life of technological environments. It innovates by integrating trans-disciplinary methods, advancing critical knowledge amongst actors of operational practices. o Primary researchers involved Univ. Prof. Dr. Manuela Bojadžijev, Humboldt University Berlin, GER (PL) Assoc. Prof. Dr. Roland Atzmüller, Johann Kepler University Linz, AT (PI) Prof. Dr. Helen Pritchard, University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland, CH (PI) Univ. Prof. Dr. Stefan Jonsson, Linköping University, SWE, (PI)

SoLiXG (The social life of xG) investigated the imaginaries shaping the development, production and maintenance of digital infrastructures, with a focus on how they influence concepts of sovereignty and community. SolixG was guided by three key questions: 1. What imaginaries shape "xG" infrastructures and digital industries and associated notions such as sovereignty, resilience, community? 2. How are these infrastructures and industries enacted and maybe challenged in local contexts? 3. What alternatives exist to dominant imaginaries, offering different conceptions of sovereignty and community? The project concluded the following research steps. Phase 1 involved a policy analysis of frameworks for digital innovation, focusing on the EU's and UK's pandemic recovery plans, as well as a review of conceptual debates on the topic of "sovereignty" "resilience" and the "twin transition" (ecological and digital transformation of societies and economies). Phase 2 investigated the imaginaries of actors developing and implementing digital infrastructures. The Austrian case focused on the semi-conductor industry respectively the "Silicon Alps" cluster. For this, interviews with experts and practitioners in these fields were conducted and public events and expert conferences of relevant actors were visited. The goal was to understand how the dominant imaginaries referring to digitalisation, the "twin transition" etc are translated and co-constructed in local contexts and how certain activities are legitimised and coordinated. SoLiXG - identified significant differences between UK and EU frameworks. Digitalization as crisis management emerged as a common theme. Digitaliziation and the "twin transition" proved powerful imaginaries guiding and combining the practices of actors in the fields - collected empirical data on how economic and political actors in the semi-conductor industries in Austria coordinate their activities and strategies and conceptualize their work in relation to resilience, sovereignty and the twin transition - highlighted the shift to imaginaries of "techno-solutionism" that view technological change and adaptation as best strategy to tackle e.g. the ecological crises and other social effects of digitalization while the social structures and crisis prone dynamics of modern societies (growth imperative, social inequalities) that lie behind social and economical transformations of modern societies become sidelined. "Techno-solutionism" promises to tackle crises and change through technological means rather than social changes.