Emilie Ouwerx
Former MSc Student
Emilie Ouwerx
Former MSc Student
Emilie obtained her MSc in Social Science of the Internet at the OII, where she was a Shirley Scholar. She also holds a BASc in Arts and Sciences from UCL, an interdisciplinary degree where she explored the impacts of emerging technologies from economic, political and cultural perspectives. Her research interests centre on digital sovereignty in Europe and the political economy of the infrastructure on which society depends, asking who owns and controls these systems, and in whose interests. Her MSc thesis proposed an STS-informed framework for evaluating digital sovereignty initiatives beyond their rhetoric, asking whether they genuinely redistribute power or simply repackage existing dependencies.
Before her MSc, she worked at ThreeFold, a Belgian decentralised cloud company, supporting the rollout of their peer-to-peer grid of storage, compute and network capacity in Tanzania. The initiative aimed to empower local developers to build and host their own digital solutions without relying on foreign cloud providers.
Digital Sovereignty, AI Governance, Political Economy of Digital Infrastructure, Technology Policy, Digital Colonialism.