Lecture on October 22, 2025
How to Achieve Digital Sovereignty in Europe?
Prof. Dr. José van Dijck (Utrecht University, NL)
About the lecture [poster]
Please note: Deviating time: 14:15-15:45 (CET)
The growing dominance of two global platform ecosystems has left European countries to rely on American and Chinese digitale infrastructures. This dependency is not just affecting markets and labor relations, but is also transforming social practices, and affecting democracies. While two large ecosystems fight for information control in the global online world, the European perspective on digital infrastructures is focused on regulation rather than on building alternatives. With emerging technologies such as generative AI (ChatGPT, Bard) and geopolitical changes, the infrastructural perspective becomes more poignant. How can Europe achieve sovereignty in the digital world?
This lecture takes up two questions. First, what public values are fundamental to Europe’s platform societies? Values such as privacy, security, transparency, equality, public trust, and (institutional, professional) autonomy are important principles upon which the design of platform architectures should be based. Second, what are the responsibilities of companies, governments, and citizens in building an alternative, sustainable platform ecosystem based on those public values?
About the speaker
José van Dijck is a distinguished university professor in Media and Digital Societies at Utrecht University (The Netherlands). In 2021, she was rewarded the Spinoza Prize, the highest academic award in Dutch academia; and the C. Edwin Baker Award for the Advancement of Scholarship on Media, Markets and Democracy, by the International Communication Association (ICA).
Her work covers a wide range of topics in media theory, media and communication technologies, social media, and digital culture. She is the (co-)author and (co)-editor of ten books and two hundred journal articles and book chapters. Her books The Culture of Connectivity. A Critical History of Social Media (Oxford UP, 2013) and The Platform Society. Public values in a connective world (Oxford UP, 2018; co-authored by Thomas Poell & Martijn de Waal) have been distributed worldwide and were translated into Spanish, Italian, Chinese and Farsi.
Van Dijck has a PhD from the University of California at San Diego (UCSD). She was formerly chair and dean at the University of Amsterdam and served one term as President of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, from 2015 until 2018. She received honorary doctorates from Lund University (Sweden, 2019) and from the University of Oslo (Norway, 2024). Her visiting appointments include M.I.T. (USA), University of Toronto (CAN), Stockholm University (SWE) and University of Technology, Sydney (AUS).
photo credit: Milette Raats (KNAW Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen),
CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Wednesday, 22. October 2025, 14:15-15:45 (CET)
Address for joining us on-site:
Flügelbau Ost, 2. OG, Raum O221
Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1
20146 Hamburg