Conference Program

This contribution analyses deepfakes not only as tools of information manipulation, but as emerging cybersecurity threats that reshape how war narratives are produced, weaponised and contested in digital environments. It situates synthetic audio and video within broader transformations of contemporary conflict, where informational and cyber domains are increasingly integrated under the rubric of hybrid warfare and information operations. In this perspective, deepfakes become instruments through which state and non‑state actors intervene both in strategic interaction with adversaries and in the mediated relationship between citizens, institutions and distant battlefields. In conflict and crisis contexts, the convergence between narrative manipulation and technical intrusion has direct implications for coercion, signalling and crisis stability, as well as for public understandings of war. Conceptually, the paper is grounded in a constructivist approach to international politics and security. It draws on work on strategic narratives and the social construction of threat, which highlights how meanings of aggression, defence, victimhood and responsibility are produced and stabilised through communicative practices and visual representations. From this perspective, deepfakes are understood as narrative and performative devices that can reframe identities and intentions by credibly simulating leaders’ speech and behaviour (“deepfake diplomacy”), thereby affecting recognition, (de)legitimation and the possibility of de‑escalation. The paper also engages constructivist research on norms and practices, asking how security communities, platforms and expert networks come to define certain synthetic artefacts as “incidents”, “attacks” or “acceptable” uses of AI, and how these classificatory practices contribute to the emergence of shared expectations and informal rules around the use of deepfakes in international and domestic politics. Empirically, the paper adopts a qualitative, multi‑case design focusing on episodes where synthetic media has been used or discussed as a tool to impersonate political, military or corporate actors in high‑stakes situations (e.g., fake military orders, fabricated emergency messages, fraudulent requests for access) and where these artefacts intersect with war or security narratives, including in the Russia - Ukraine context. Drawing on opensource investigations, academic and policy studies on “deepfake diplomacy” and “deepfakes and international conflict”, and industry reports, it maps how such deepfakes are anticipated, produced, disseminated and detected, and how organisations translate them into cybersecurity incidents (e.g., social engineering attacks, compromise of communication channels, integrity breaches. The central research question guiding the analysis is: How do security communities and political actors, understood in constructivist terms, come to frame deepfakes as a distinct cybersecurity threat, and how does this framing reshape the practices, norms and narratives through which war and security are publicly represented?

This paper investigates how the platformization and datafication of primary education in Spain—largely mediated by infrastructures provided by major Big Tech companies—reconfigure educational governance, institutional agency, and everyday experiences in school communities. Grounded in critical perspectives on digital education, platforms are approached as sociotechnical infrastructures embedded in political, economic, and institutional power relations rather than as neutral pedagogical tools (Williamson, 2017; van Dijck et al., 2018). Within this framing, platformization is conceptualized as the reorganization of professional autonomy, data practices, and governance arrangements around logics of standardization, dependency, and infrastructural control (Selwyn, 2019), raising questions about digital sovereignty in public schooling.

Methodologically, the study adopts a comparative qualitative design across three autonomous communities—Catalunya, Castilla-La Mancha, and the Comunitat Valenciana. The comparative focus is justified by Spain’s decentralized governance of education, which produces territorially differentiated policy instruments, procurement arrangements, and administrative infrastructures. Comparison therefore enables us to specify not simply whether corporate platforms become dominant, but how platformization is institutionally assembled through distinct mechanisms—particularly (a) identity and access management and (b) device and service provisioning linked to administrative compliance. Empirical material consists of interviews with policymakers and technology-company representatives, as well as interviews and focus groups with school leaders, digital coordinators, teachers, students, and families.

Findings show that Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams, and private communication services (e.g., Dinantia) have become integral to school organization and communication, commonly normalized through usability, interoperability, and perceived efficiency. Yet the comparative analysis highlights substantive territorial differences. In the Catalan cases analyzed, institutionally managed accounts and authentication (e.g., domain-based accounts and single sign-on) operating through corporate platforms appear to produce a systemic form of platformization anchored in administrative routines, narrowing the space for locally developed alternatives and reinforcing infrastructural dependency. In the Castilla–La Mancha cases analyzed, the institutional provision of devices and administrative platforms seems to generate a functional duality between bureaucratic compliance and everyday pedagogical practice, intensifying pragmatic teacher adaptations and producing uneven distributions of data-related responsibilities. In the Valencian Community cases analyzed, despite normative controls over application ecosystems and a legacy associated with open-source solutions, Microsoft infrastructures tend to prevail due to perceived stability and security, even as privacy concerns remain explicit.

Across cases, we identify a “usability trap," that is, corporate platforms consolidate dominance not only through policy decisions but also through technical integration that establishes de facto standards and marginalizes public or local solutions. The paper argues that platformization and datafication are political-institutional processes that redistribute agency and digital sovereignty, and it calls for stronger democratic deliberation on infrastructure choices and more just data governance in schooling.

The growing hybridization of educational spaces, where physical classrooms intersect with digital platforms and informal networks, cannot be reduced to a mere technological shift. It reflects broader processes of platformisation and datafication that are reshaping the governance, visibility, and normative foundations of schooling. In this sense, hybrid schooling must be read within longer trajectories of rationalization and social ordering (Durkheim, 1961; Weber, 1978), now rearticulated through networked infrastructures (Castells, 1996) and cultures of convergence (Jenkins, 2006). This article offers a sociological framework that bridges classical theories of social order and rationalization with contemporary analyses of algorithmic governance and digital visibility (Han, 2015). Rather than celebrating or rejecting digital transformation, the paper conceptualizes hybrid schooling as a field structured by three enduring tensions: stability and adaptability, emancipation and control, inclusion and inequality. These tensions resonate with longstanding debates on democracy and education (Dewey, 1916; Biesta, 2013) and with critical analyses of social reproduction and distinction (Bourdieu, 1979). Building on this analytical triad, the article proposes a governance oriented model for hybrid communities grounded in environmental design, critical media literacy (Buckingham, 2003; Rivoltella, 2017), collaboration as a commons (Benkler, 2006), transparent data governance, and plural evaluation metrics. The central argument is that schools can evolve into reflective institutions only if they consciously negotiate the infrastructural power of platforms, preserve protected spaces of opacity, and redistribute decision making authority over data and metrics. By reframing hybrid education as a site where democratic agency and algorithmic governance coexist in tension, the paper contributes to current debates on the platformisation and datafication of education.

The COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed an unprecedented and rapid expansion of digital platforms within global education systems. This transition often occurred without sufficient critical reflection on its structural implications for pedagogical processes, school data sovereignty, or teacher labor conditions (Díez Gutiérrez, 2021). The Spanish educational landscape reflects this trend; as noted by Rivera et al. (2023), 79.7% of Spanish institutions rely on digital infrastructures provided by Big Tech conglomerates, such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, through institutional agreements with regional governments. This systemic dependency has intensified debates surrounding technological sovereignty, datafication, and the reconfiguration of the teaching profession within platform-mediated environments.

Post-emergency, these digital tools and their associated practices have become deeply embedded in the institutional fabric of schools. This new normalcy has introduced emerging professional demands, including: (1) the implementation of techno-pedagogical methodologies; (2) the continuous production of digital content; and (3) the oversight of students’ digital wellbeing and the prevention of problematic technology use (Blanco Navarro et al., 2025).

Transcending purely regulatory or macro-structural analyses, this study explores the opportunities, constraints, and emerging tensions of school digitalization from the subjective perspective of teachers. Understanding these perceptions is vital for designing educational policies and teacher training programs capable of fostering a reflexive and critical response to the challenges of platformization.

Methodologically, this research draws on eleven focus groups conducted with primary school teachers across various Spanish regions. This work is part of the second phase of the R&D project Digital platforms and datafication in Spanish primary education: protecting children in a context of educational digitalization (DigiProtEd), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (PID2022-137033NA-I00).

Utilizing an inductive qualitative analysis, the study systematizes how pedagogical, managerial, and communicative uses of platforms intersect with daily teaching practice. Preliminary findings suggest a dual reality; while platforms enhance communicative immediacy and administrative efficiency, they simultaneously contribute to the "intensification" of teaching labor. This is evidenced by an expansion of working hours, increased bureaucratic burdens, and the expectation of permanent availability, alongside new responsibilities in data curation and digital guardianship.

In an era of intensifying geopolitical conflict and the militarisation of European political discourse, peace movements occupy a paradoxical position within contemporary digital communication: structurally marginalised in mainstream media representation, yet among the few collective actors actively contesting the narrative and visual forms through which wars are told — storylines of aggression and defence, figures of victims and heroes, frames of legitimacy and moral necessity. This paper examines the Italian peace movement as a communicative actor challenging dominant war narratives within a media environment shaped by platform logics, information disorder, and the growing presence of synthetic content.

Drawing on Gramsci's concept of hegemony and mediatisation theory (Hjarvard, Couldry, Hepp), and situated within debates on information disorder (Wardle & Derakhshan) and connected publics (Boccia Artieri), the research conceptualises the peace movement as a form of collective enunciation operating under conditions of profound communicative asymmetry. The theoretical framework integrates critical discourse analysis (CDA) with attention to platform affordances and algorithmic visibility.

Methodologically, the research combines two approaches. The first is a discourse analysis of political speech acts by Italian parliamentary representatives and government officials concerning peace, war, and military support since the Russo-Ukrainian war and the renewed Middle East crisis. This corpus spans parliamentary debates, media appearances, and social media communication across X, TikTok, and Telegram, mapping the rhetorical structures through which war is legitimised and dissent delegitimised — through securitisation, emotional framing, strategic mobilisation of historical memory, and the discursive construction of peace activists as naïve or complicit.

The second approach examines the communicative practices of the peace movement itself across digital platforms, analysing how movement actors produce counter-narratives linking pacifism to critiques of NATO militarisation, arms industry interests, and the democratic deficit in foreign policy. Crucially, it investigates how these counter-narratives operate within a digital environment where epistemic conditions are fundamentally altered: as synthetic media and deepfakes increasingly infiltrate conflict coverage — as investigations into AI-generated content during the 2025 India–Pakistan crisis and staged footage in the Russia–Ukraine and Israel–Gaza contexts have shown — the terrain on which peace movements contest dominant framings is itself unstable. The erosion of trust in audiovisual evidence structurally weakens the evidentiary resources available to counter-hegemonic actors who lack institutional authority to anchor their claims within a fragmented information ecosystem.

Comparing institutional and movement discourse reveals a profound asymmetry of symbolic power, but also how platform logics generate contradictory effects: algorithmic visibility tends to favour affective framings reinforcing war narratives, yet the same platforms enable episodic moments of counter-narrative resonance. The paper contributes to critical media studies by arguing that the Italian peace movement functions as a liminal communicative space where alternative political subjectivities are constructed at the margins of platformised discursive power — and that understanding this marginality requires attention to the interplay between narrative contestation, information disorder, and the epistemic crisis of democratic deliberation on war in contemporary Europe.