See Francesca Musiani's strategic plan for 2025-2028
Francesca Musiani is Research Professor (Directrice de recherche, HDR) at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). She is the co-founder and current director of the Center for Internet and Society of CNRS, a research unit of 16 CNRS personnel, and deputy director of the research network on Internet, AI and Society coordinated by CIS, gathering more than 700 members as of 2025. Francesca is also an associate researcher at the Center for the sociology of innovation (i3/MINES ParisTech) and a Global Fellow at the Internet Governance Lab, American University in Washington, DC.
Francesca’s research work focuses on Internet governance “by architecture” and “by infrastructure,” in an interdisciplinary perspective merging information and communication sciences, science and technology studies (STS) and international law. Her current primary research focus is the role of infrastructures in digital sovereignty strategies, explored in a project funded by the French National Agency for Research (ANR), DIGISOV (https://digisov.org, 2024-2027) and an Open Research Area project, ClaimSov (2025-2028).
Francesca has published numerous scientific contributions. Among the most recent, Concealing for Freedom. The Making of Encryption, Secure Messaging and Digital Liberties (with Ksenia Ermoshina, 2022, Mattering Press) and Genèse d’un autoritarisme numérique: Répression et résistance sur Internet en Russie, 2012-2022 (ed. with Françoise Daucé and Benjamin Loveluck, Presses des Mines, 2023, English version forthcoming in September 2025 with MIT Press).
Francesca is a member of the scientific council of the French Cybersecurity Agency (ANSSI, since 2022) and vice-president for research of Internet Society France (since 2017). She has previously served on the Commission de réflexion sur le droit et les libertés à l’âge dunumérique of the French Parliament in 2014-2015. She is a previous co-chair of the Emerging Scholars Network (2012-2016) and of the Communication Policy and Technology Section (2017-2024) and current elected member of the International Council of the International Association for Media and Communication Research.
In 2023, she was presented one of the annual Awards of the French Foundation for the Social Sciences, the special mention of the Stefano Rodotà Award for Data Protection by the Council of Europe, and the Woman Cyber Researcher Award by the French Circle of Women in Cybersecurity.