Digital Commons: Infrastructures, Design and the Ethics of Autonomy

Digital Commons: Infrastructures, Design, and the Ethics of Autonomy 

Call for Papers and Panels
Co-organized by the Department of Social Anthropology, Panteion University & the Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications, National Center for Scientific Research “Demokritos”

8-10 October 2026, Athens, Greece

Venues: Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences & NCSR Demokritos. Parallel events will take place at AiTHERION. 

In an age where digital infrastructures shape our modes of living, learning, organizing, and surviving, the notion of the commons offers a potent ground for rethinking how technologies are built, owned, and governed. This conference invites critical dialogue on digital commons not as fixed platforms or technical solutions, but as ongoing, situated struggles over autonomy, access, and collective care.

Drawing from decolonial design, infrastructure studies, anthropology, STS, design research, feminist & indigenous studies, and informatics, the event centers on how communities, scholars, and technologists enact commons through/about/for digital infrastructures. What forms of life do digital commons sustain or suppress? How do marginalized actors repurpose networks, code, and platforms to build systems of mutual support, resistance, and futurity? What design practices enable infrastructural commons to emerge, and how might they be scaled without reproducing extractive logics? How do protocols, software architectures, and governance models embed, contest or refuse particular values? And how does AI and algorithmic mediation reconfigure cultural meaning, heritage, and collective memory within digital commons?

Alongside academic panels and presentations, parallel activities will be hosted at AiTHERION, a hub for public dialogue developed by NCSR Demokritos and the Hellenic Ministry of Culture. AiTHERION fosters reflection through technology-driven philosophy exhibitions, public debates, and immersive experiences. These events will promote public dialogue and encourage cross-disciplinary and civic engagement.

Core themes include:

• Infrastructural Commoning, Law & Governance

From local networks and cooperative clouds to peer-to-peer architectures and autonomous tech collectives. Exploring how infrastructures can be reclaimed and reimagined beyond market logics, and how legal frameworks, ownership models, and platform regulation shape or challenge these practices.

• Designing Otherwise & Ethics/Accountability

Participatory, feminist, and pluriversal approaches to digital systems. Care and harm in design; ethics of participation and exclusion; algorithmic bias and fairness; collective data stewardship and privacy in commons-based infrastructures.

• Value, Labor, and Ownership

Commons-based and open-source production models; platform cooperativism and postcapitalist economies. The shifting boundaries of waged/unwaged, visible/invisible labor, and the politics of collective ownership, regulation, and sustainability.

• Anthropologies of Mediation & Cultural AI Commons

Cultural biographies of infrastructure and code as mediators of affect, belonging, and resistance. AI in heritage and cultural institutions; algorithmic mediation of memory and identity; community-based digitization; participatory design of cultural AI. Questions of bias, erasure, epistemic justice, and the imaginaries of counter-hegemonic cultural AI.

• Technopolitics & Epistemic Justice

Indigenous, migrant, and activist appropriations of digital tools for sovereignty and autonomy. Struggles against extractive paradigms, surveillance, and enclosure. Design as a contested site where alternative futures and value systems are articulated.

• Interdisciplinary Constellations

Collaborations between anthropology, design, informatics, and adjacent fields. Bridging ethnographic insight and technical implementation, and cultivating shared vocabularies for critical and socially responsible digital practice.