At the Critical Infrastructure Lab, we research power and contestation in transnational media infrastructures. Our goal is to cultivate alternative infrastructural futures that center people and planet over profit and capital. We aim to do this by establishing a community around three infrastructural subtopics (geopolitics, standards, environment), producing a sound body of research, and developing actionable policy recommendations and strategic insights.
The project will research the infrastructures of the Chinese and Russian internet to deepen our understanding of how these infrastructures are evolving and shaping the censorship and surveillance measures introduced by these states. We investigate how these developments impact the way circumvention tools work and aim to uncover the policy-implementation pipeline, which actors are involved, and how these translations are made.
Overall, the project aims to increase the understanding of the development and evolution of network and information controls in Russia and China among tool developers, civil society, and end users.
