Congratulations to MOCS member Olga Boichak
on being awarded funding from the Australian Research Council for the project Digital sovereignty and colonialisms in the Russian-Ukrainian war.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is the first war in history where internet connectivity has been contested and weaponised. This project offers the first systematic mapping of digital sovereignty in Ukraine by attending to the changing social, cultural, and institutional practices surrounding its media infrastructures. It documents how shifting state borders are enacted and encoded through digital technologies, drawing links among topographical layers of internet connectivity that exist at different scales and constitute colonial media ecologies. Maintaining technological autonomy and resilience – a necessary condition for achieving digital sovereignty – is contingent on an intricate understanding of pathways and materialities of media infrastructures that enable it. This includes the technologies themselves, as well as the social, cultural, and institutional norms and contexts surrounding internet connectivity.