Bridging Digital Borders
Luxembourg is the birthplace of the Schengen Agreement, which eliminated border checks among 29 European countries. Situated between Belgium, France, and Germany, Luxembourg is a veritable melting pot of cultures, with nearly half of its residents holding foreign nationalities – both from across Europe and around the world.
Redefining borders in the digital age
Much as the Schengen Agreement reduced the burden of geographical borders, digital technologies unleashed new ways of working across borders. By expanding connectivity, digital technologies have allowed individuals, organisations, and societies to communicate and collaborate across borders at an unprecedented speed and scale. At the same time, digital technologies also introduce new barriers: algorithmic decision-making, the spread of generative artificial intelligence, rules and policies associated with security and privacy, platform and enterprise architectures, and data governance arrangements, for instance, all help define who can, and who cannot, participate, and how such actors can benefit from digital technologies. Digital technologies thus simultaneously reshape the meaning of physical borders while creating and shaping new digital ones.
Advancing meaningful connectivity
Bridging digital borders requires more than linking systems or scaling infrastructures. It calls for critical reflection on how these borders arise, whose interests they serve, and whom they disadvantage. ECIS 2027 invites research that examines and rethinks these digital borders as a central theme and that develops theories, methods, and design approaches to advance meaningful connectivity in an increasingly interconnected world.
