Conference Program

Contemporary debates on disinformation often focus on the circulation of false or misleading content within digital environments. Yet the current crisis is not only informational but infrastructural. It concerns the transformation of the epistemic infrastructures through which knowledge becomes visible, credible, and authoritative in the public sphere. Rather than a simple crisis of information, the present moment can therefore be understood as a reconfiguration of the infrastructures that organize the production and validation of knowledge.

This paper develops the concept of epistemic capture to describe the process through which infrastructures governing the circulation and validation of knowledge are reorganized according to the logics of platform capitalism and broader techno-industrial complexes where economic interests, state governance, and military or security apparatuses increasingly intersect. Within these configurations, virality, immediacy, and data extraction reshape the visibility and legitimacy of knowledge while weakening the institutional autonomy of educational and scientific systems.

In an increasingly platformized global society, information infrastructures no longer operate as neutral communication channels but as socio-technical architectures that shape the circulation and credibility of knowledge claims. Algorithmic curation, recommendation systems, and opaque ranking mechanisms mediate how individuals access information and form judgments about truth and authority. As Bratton (2015) suggests, these computational architectures operate as quasi-sovereign systems capable of reorganizing public discourse beyond traditional institutional accountability, functioning as devices of digital governmentality that orient cognitive practices and regimes of visibility. In this context, can universities—historically central institutions in the validation and transmission of knowledge—still claim epistemic centrality in the public sphere, or is this role progressively migrating toward computational infrastructures governed by extra-academic logics?

From a historical perspective, this transformation recalls earlier technological asymmetries in the control of knowledge. Writing itself functioned for centuries as a technology of epistemic authority monopolized by small literate elites. Today, infrastructures of artificial intelligence, algorithmic mediation, and large-scale data extraction risk generating comparable forms of epistemic concentration if their functioning remains opaque to most citizens. One of the central democratic challenges of contemporary education therefore lies in preventing the emergence of a new form of computational epistemic oligarchy.

The paper draws on findings from an exploratory sociological study conducted with students at Sapienza University of Rome. Combining interviews and questionnaires, the research investigates how students acquire and evaluate information within contemporary media ecosystems. Preliminary findings reveal a significant epistemic asymmetry: although students inhabit digital environments daily, they rarely possess the conceptual tools required to critically interrogate the algorithmic infrastructures organizing knowledge production and legitimation.

The democratic question today concerns not only freedom of access to information but also the capacity to understand and interrogate the epistemic infrastructures that organize knowledge production. Universities are therefore called upon to reclaim their role as civic institutions capable of guaranteeing a democratic epistemic right: the capacity of citizens to access, understand, and critically interrogate the infrastructures structuring contemporary social life. This requires pedagogical strategies capable of making algorithmic cognition intelligible and democratizing the mathematical and computational foundations that structure the global information ecosystem.