For all among you attending the AoIR conference in Berlin in October, please find below the programme of our pre-conference "The Internet Rules, But How? A STS Take on Doing Internet Governance". Please keep in mind that the Early Bird deadline for AoIR2016 is August 1st.

Best regards,
Julia, on behalf of the workshop organisers

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The Internet Rules, But How? A Science and Technology Studies (STS) Take on Doing Internet Governance

Organizers:  Dmitry Epstein (University of Illinois, Chicago), Christian Katzenbach (Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Berlin), Francesca Musiani (ISCC – CNRS/Paris-Sorbonne/UPMC Paris), Julia Pohle (WZB Berlin Social Science Center)

Over the last decade, the regulation and governance of the Internet at the national and international level have attracted growing attention by policy-makers and researchers. This is particularly the case in post-Snowden times which increased distrust of formal government institutions and their ‘dangerous liaisons’ with the private sector. Accordingly, observing and researching governing processes as they relate to the Internet is both timely and important.

Traditionally, researchers and practitioners in Internet governance (IG) focused on new institutions established to discuss and negotiate the technical coordination of the Internet or related policies. Recently, authors have criticized this institutional focus, and perspectives from Science and Technology Studies (STS) suggest to rethink and substantiate questions of ordering and governing the net. In this view, the ‘doing’ of IG more broadly consists in practices and controversies of the design, regulation, and use of material infrastructures, as well as digital uses and practices.

This preconference workshop seeks to nurture the growing interest in researching and observing IG from STS-informed perspectives. More broadly, the workshop aims to facilitate a discussion and an exchange of perspectives about the intertwined roles of design, infrastructures, and informal communities of practice in IG. This workshop is part of a broader effort of advancing an STS-informed conversation on Internet governance: it builds on the panel on STS perspectives on IG that took place during AoIR 2015 in Phoenix and a forthcoming special issue of the Internet Policy Review (to be published in early September 2016).

Tentative program

08:45         Welcome

09:00         Keynote, Laura DeNardis

09:45        Session I. STS and Theoretical Perspectives on Internet Governance

• Moderator: Dmitry Epstein
  
  
• Doing Internet Governance: Constructing Normative Structures inside and outside Intermediary Organisations
  Tobias Mast, Markus Oermann and Wolfgang Schulz   
  
  
• Situated Governance: On Topological Limits to Internet Governance
  Ashwin Mathew
  
  
• Designing a Public Intervention: Towards a Sociotechnical Approach to Web Governance
  Faranak Hardcastle, Susan Halford and L. Moreau
  
  
• Building an Authoritarian Counter‐Hegemony? Iran in the Global Debate about Internet Governance
  Marcus Michaelsen

11:15        Coffee Break

11:30       Session II. Controversies: Unpacking Internet Governance

• Moderator: Julia Pohle
  
  
• Privacy Concerns in the Domain Name System
  Samantha Bradshaw and Laura DeNardis
  
  
• SNS Infrastructure as an Actor
  Inbar Michelzon Drori
  
  
• Critical infrastructure due diligence – ISPs, security and privacy (tbc)
  Joanna Kulesza
  
  
• Migrating Servers, Elusive Users: Reconfigurations of the Russian Internet in the Post-Snowden Era
  Ksenia Ermoshina and Francesca Musiani
  
  

13:00        Lunch

14:00        Session III. Round table: Doing STS-informed Internet Governance Research

• Moderator: Francesca Musiani
  
  
• Internet Policy as a Minority Rights Issue
  Andrea Hackl
  
  
• Search engine imaginary. Visions and values in the co-production of search technology and Europe
  Astrid Mager
  
  
• Human rights and internet infrastructure. Sociotechnical imaginaries and grassroots ordering in internet governance
  Stefania Milan and Niels ten Oever
  
  
• Opening the black box of discursive production in multistakeholder policy-making
  Julia Pohle
  
  

15:30        Coffee Break

16:00        Round table: Opening the Black Boxes of Today’s Internet (Governance)

• Moderator: Christian Katzenbach
  
  
• Participants: Laura DeNardis (tbc), Jeanette Hofmann, Tarleton Gillespie (tbc), Stéphane Couture, Dmitry Epstein

17:30        End of the Workshop