Léa Stiefel

I am PhD student at the University of Lausanne (under supervision of Prof. D. Vinck). I started my thesis in digital studies in 2017. My master thesis and previous work concerned the issue of data and its sharing in the field of personalized health and biobanking. In 2017 I swapped my application domain with agriculture where data sharing was a widespread concern. Two national projects were competing to define the informational infrastructure that would enable data sharing between public administrations and private organizations in the agricultural sector. The first project consisted in the design of a centralized data warehouse for the whole agricultural sector, the second in a peer-to-peer platform for the authorized transmission of data between public and private organisations in the sector. Both projects had similar ambitions: to promote innovation and competitiveness. But their architectures (centralized versus distributed) involved very different socio-technical arrangements. The peer-to-peer platform ended up being my ethnographic field of inquiry from January 2018 to September 2019.

My research areas include: infrastructure studies, platform studies, internet studies, critical innovation studies, digital commons and governance through architecture.

I am member of or affiliated with: the Science and Technology Studies Laboratory (STSLab, University of Lausanne); the Laboratory

of Uses and Design of Information and Communication Technologies (LUDTIC, University of Montreal); the Science, Technology and Innovation Studies Laboratory (STIS, University of Edinburgh), the Center for Internet and Society (CIS, CNRS); the Computer Science Department (IIUN, University of Neuchâtel).