Nathalie Casemajor Loustau
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Nathalie Casemajor is a Professor at the Centre Urbanisation Culture Société of INRS (Institut national de la recherche scientifique, Montréal). Her research focuses on the intersections of culture, technology, and territories. Her recent work examines global knowledge platforms, digital commons, data cultures, technological scenes, and blockchain. She holds the Research Chair on Digital Commons and is Director of the Fernand-Dumont Chair on Culture. From 2017 to 2023, she served as Scientific Director of the Observatory of Cultural Mediations (OMEC). She is also a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Digital Social Research and a recipient of the Louise-Dandurand Award, granted by the Fonds Société et culture du Québec (FRQSC).
Nathalie Casemajor Loustau joins the Paris IAS in June 2026 for one month as part of the "Distinguished Fellowship program" developed in collaboration with PostGenAI@Paris, led by Sorbonne University. Based in the heart of Paris, this interdisciplinary and cross-sector consortium aims to promote ethical, inclusive and sovereign AI that is fully rooted in the major challenges of our time.
The Paris IAS welcomes international researchers to support them in their research on artificial intelligence, its consequences for our societies and the prospects it offers for the future.
Research topics
Communication Studies.
Governing Data Commons in the Post-Generative AI Web: Open Knowledge, Plurality, and Platform Power
This project investigates how the reconfiguration of the Web in the context of generative AI technologies and their societal consequences impacts the governance of data commons. It focuses on GLAM institutions (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) and actors from the free knowledge movement (notably Wikimedia), which act as stewards of public knowledge and open cultural data.
The post-generative AI Web is marked by a growing sense of extractive asymmetries: that is, the uneven burdens and benefits involved in data harvesting, where a few powerful actors extract value from content produced and maintained by public or civic infrastructures. In this context, organizations that produce, curate, and maintain open knowledge datasets must rethink their governance models and value propositions. How does the reconfiguration of the Web’s informational ecosystem reshape the conditions for data commons governance? How do these organizations balance the need for autonomy with the realities of interdependence within a platformized Web? This project adopts a relational conception of platform power which highlights the dynamic interdependencies between data commons and dominant private platforms.
The goal is to better understand the strategies they deploy to negotiate technical and organizational dependencies while asserting civic-public values and the ethos of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (F/LOSS). Grounded in critical data studies and cultural analysis, this project draws on qualitative fieldwork, collaborative partnerships, and knowledge mobilization initiatives to produce new insights into the evolving ethics and politics of open data infrastructures.
Key publications
Casemajor, N. (2025), "L’entre-prise des communs. Trajectoire des relations entre Wikimédia et Google", Réseaux, 254 (6), 113-146. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3917/res.254.0113
Casemajor, N. (2025), "Data cultures: Contested meanings in a public cultural institution", Big Data & Society, 12 (3). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517251381671
Casemajor, N., Gentelet, K. & Coocoo C. (2021) "Openness, inclusion and self-affirmation: Indigenous knowledge in open knowledge projects", Journal of Peer Production, 1-17.
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