What does it mean to make digital fairness European? Fairness is now at the centre of EU digital regulation. The Digital Markets Act, the Digital Services Act, the Data Act, the AI Act, the GDPR and the renewed interest in Article 102 TFEU all use the vocabulary of fairness, contestability, autonomy and accountability. Yet the meaning of fairness in Europe is old, layered and politically contested. It goes back to just price, moral economy, ordoliberalism, the social market economy and long-running debates about public authority and private power.

This one-day research workshop, organised by FIDMA with funding from the Centre for Modern European Studies (CEMES), treats digital fairness as a question about how modern Europe has changed. It does not treat it as a narrow technology-law issue. Researchers from law, political science, media studies and European studies will ask:

  • How did fairness move from moral economy and just price into today’s regulatory vocabulary?
  • How do EU digital and AI laws reshape ideas of autonomy, democracy and consumer citizenship
  • Who gets to define fair AI, and how do European fairness norms travel globally?
  • What does digital sovereignty mean in practice, and who benefits from it?

The day brings together researchers from across the Öresund region and wider Europe: Malmö, Lund, Copenhagen, CBS, Uppsala, KTH, Münster, Ilmenau, Humboldt, NOVA and the University of East London. It closes with a public roundtable with researchers, policymakers and enforcement authorities.

Register for 'Towards European Digital Fairness and Sovereignty'

CEMES–FIDMA Seminar Program

09:00–09:10 Registration and coffee

09:10–09:15 Welcome address (speaker to be confirmed)

09:15–10:30 Morning Panel 1: Fairness in Digital and AI Markets

Chair: Annegrete Engel — Associate Professor / Senior Lecturer, Department of Law, Lund University

09:15–09:30: Digital Fairness Defined as Autonomy and Sovereignty

Behrang Kianzad — Senior Researcher and Lecturer, Malmö University; Fabrizio Esposito — Associate Professor in Private Law, NOVA School of Law

09:30–09:45: Distinct and Applied Notions of EU Private Law Fairness — A Fair Bargain?

Jan-Frederick Göhsl — Junior Professor, University of Münster; Juliane Mendelsohn — Junior Professor, Technische Universität Ilmenau

09:45–10:00: Algorithmic Personalised Pricing and Digital Fairness: Beyond Exploitative Abuse

Dr. Miroslava Marinova — Senior Lecturer in Commercial Law, University of East London

10:00–10:30 Joint panel discussion; moderated by Annegrete Engel

10:30–10:45 Fika / coffee break

10:45–12:15 Morning Panel 2: Autonomy, Sovereignty and AI Politics

Chair: Behrang Kianzad — Senior Researcher and Lecturer, Department of Global Political Studies, Malmö University

10:45–11:00: Empirical software engineering, open technologies, and digital sovereignty

Johan Linåker, Senior Researcher at RISE Research Institutes of Sweden and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Lund University -

11:00–11:15: Human Oversight in the AI Act: The Case of Employees of AI Systems

Eduardo Gill Pedro — Associate Professor in EU Law / Senior Lecturer, Department of Law, Lund University

11:15–11:30: Beyond Idealized Policy and Legal Imaginaries: Fairness in AI Creation and Use. Empirical Lessons Learned from the Data4Sci Project

Katja de Vries, Associate Professor & Andreas Kotsios, Associate Professor — Uppsala University; André Holzapfel, Associate Professor — KTH Royal Institute of Technology

11:30–11:45: Danish Implementation and Enforcement of the DMA

Kathrine Søs Jacobsen Cesko — Assistant Professor, Copenhagen Business School

11:45–12:15 Joint panel discussion; moderated by Behrang Kianzad

12:15–13:30 Lunch

13:30–15:00 Afternoon Panel: Sovereignty and Fairness in Digital and AI Markets

Chair: Fabrizio Esposito — Associate Professor, Nova School of Law, Lisbon

13:30–13:45: Who Gets to Define Fair AI? Corporate Sociotechnical Imaginaries of Fairness and Sovereignty in Europe, China, and the United States

Dechun Zhang, Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Communication, University of Copenhagen & Yuxi Huang, Doctoral Researcher, GRESEC, Université Grenoble Alpes —

13:45–14:00: The Politics of Ethical AI: Sensemaking, Digital Sovereignty and Citizen Participation in the European Union

Jess Haynie-Lavelle — Doctoral candidate, Department of Global Political Studies, Malmö University

14:15–14:30: Fairness and Good Faith: Still a Binomial in Platform Law?

Caterina Bresci — Doctoral Candidate, Humboldt University of Berlin

14:45–15:15 Joint panel discussion, moderated by Fabrizio Esposito

15:15–15:30 Fika / coffee break

15:30–16:30 Closing Roundtable

Annegret Engel – Associate Professor / Senior Lecturer, Lund University; Eduardo Gill Pedro – Associate Professor / Senior Lecturer, Lund University; Juliane Mendelsohn – Junior Professor, Technische Universität Ilmenau; Jan-Frederick Göhsl – Junior Professor, University of Münster; Danish / Swedish political representative(s) – TBC; Swedish enforcement authority / AI Sweden representative – TBC

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