The Design Research Lab is a network of people, organisations, and non-human agents engaged at the intersection of technologies, materials, and social practices. Our aim is to design socially and ecologically sustainable tools, spaces, and knowledge that support people’s participation in a digital society – based on common principles of inclusiveness and respect for the planet. This puts the basic democratic right to take part in the digital sphere into practice. We start our research from individual lifeworlds and the needs of minoritized groups, beyond consumer majorities.
We are an interdisciplinary team of designers, researchers, tech-enthusiasts and critical thinkers from Berlin University of the Arts, German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, as well as Einsteincenter Digital Future (ECDF).
In this week’s session of the Virtual Colloquium we will have Anna Litvinenko as our guest. Her talk is titled “Re-defining Borders Online: Russian Concept of Internet Sovereignty in the Context of Global Internet Governance”
Over the past decades, internet governance has developed in a tug‐of‐war between the democratic, transnational nature of the web, and attempts by national governments to put cyberspace under control. Recently, the idea of digital sovereignty has started to increasingly gain more supporters among nation states. This article is a case study on the Russian concept of a “sovereign internet.” In 2019, the so‐called law on sustainable internet marked a new milestone in the development of RuNet. Drawing on document analysis and expert interviews, I reconstruct Russia’s strategic narrative on internet sovereignty and its evolution over time. The talk places the Russian case in a global context and discusses the importance of strategic narratives of digital sovereignty for the future of internet governance.
Anna Litvinenko (PhD) is a researcher in the Digitalization and Participation Department at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies, FU Berlin, Germany. In 2015–2020, she was a member of the Emmy Noether Junior Research Group “Mediating (Semi-)Authoritarianism––The Power of the Internet in the Post-Soviet World” at FU Berlin. After receiving her PhD in 2007, she was associate professor in the Department of International Journalism at St. Petersburg University, Russia. Her research focuses on political communication in the digital age, comparative media studies, and the role of social media in various socio‐political contexts.
For the speakers list of this semester and for information on registration, please have a look here.