[Air-L] CfP session on “Uneven and Contested Geographies of Data Centers”

[Finn Dammann]

Dear colleagues,

please find here a call for abstracts for a session on “Uneven and 
Contested Geographies of Data Centers” at the Annual International 
Conference of the Royal Geographical Society/Institute of British 
Geographers 2026 (September 1-4, London). We would be pleased to receive 
contribution proposals from AoIR!

Best regards,

Finn Dammann & Boris Michel


+++


  Uneven and Contested Geographies of Data Centres

In recent years, data centres have become an increasingly common subject 
of public and political debate (Edwards, 2024). The focus and criticism 
in these debates are usually directed at the massive consumption of 
natural resources (Brodie, 2024; Hogan, 2015), their effect on local 
communities (Bridges, 2024), and the concentration of geopolitical power 
– especially with regards to large data centers that are currently being 
planned or built in the context of the hype surrounding artificial 
intelligence. As essential infrastructure for living in our increasingly 
datafied worlds and for organising digital capitalism, data centres also 
raise a variety of geographical questions and problems. These range from 
the conflict-ridden embedding of data centres in local environments 
(Rone, 2024), to their role in larger infrastructure constellations 
(Atkins, 2021; Velkova, 2016), urban settings, and geopolitical issues 
such as digital sovereignty, digital colonialism (Kwet, 2019) and data 
localisation (Rosa, 2022). This session brings together conceptual and 
empirical contributions to critical data centre studies and research on 
the geographies of digital infrastructures. Against this backdrop, we 
look forward to contributions from researchers in digital geography, 
political geography, urban studies, political ecology and science and 
technology studies, examining the socio-technical imaginations, material 
effects and geopolitical and infrastructural embeddings of data centres. 
Papers might engage with topics such as data centers in the Global South 
/ Global Majority regions, contested infrastructuralization of data 
centers in rural and urban areas, the embedding of data centers in 
geopolitical strategies, programs, and conflicts, sociotechnical 
imaginations of AI data centers or social movements mobilizing against 
the data centers.

Please send a 250-word abstract and a 50-word bio to 
boris.michel at geo.uni-halle.de <mailto:boris.michel at geo.uni-halle.de>and 
_finn.dammann at fau.de_ by 16th February 2026.


      Keywords:

Digital Infrastructures, Data Centers, digital Geography, Cloud, AI


      Literature

Atkins, E. (2021). Tracing the ‘cloud’: Emergent political geographies 
of global data centres. Political Geography, 86, 102306. 
_https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2020.102306_

Brodie, P. (2024). Smarter, greener extractivism: Digital 
infrastructures and the harnessing of new resources. Information, 
Communication & Society, 1–20. 
_https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2024.2341013_

Bridges, L. E. (2024). Competing digital capacities: Between state-led 
digital governance and local data center tradeoffs. Information, 
Communication & Society, 27(10), 1906–1923. 
_https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2024.2331765_

Edwards, D., Cooper, Z. G. T., & Hogan, M. (2024). The making of 
critical data center studies. Convergence, 13548565231224157. 
_https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231224157_

Hogan, M. (2015). Data flows and water woes: The Utah Data Center. Big 
Data & Society, 2(2), 2053951715592429. 
_https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951715592429_

Kwet, M. (2022). Digital colonialism and Infrastructure as dept. 
Frontiers in African Digital Research, 65–77.

Rone, J. (2024). The shape of the cloud: Contesting date centre 
construction in North Holland. New Media & Society, 26(10), 5999–6018. 
_https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221145928_

Rosa, F. R. (2022). Code Ethnography and the Materiality of Power in 
Internet Governance. Qualitative Sociology, 45(3), 433–455. 
_https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-022-09517-3_

Velkova, J. (2016). Data that warms: Waste heat, infrastructural 
convergence and the computation traffic commodity. Big Data & Society, 
3(2), 2053951716684144. _https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951716684144_

-- 
Dr. Finn Dammann
Institut für Geographie
Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
https://www.geographie.nat.fau.de/ng-geographien-digitaler-infrastrukturen/
https://www.geographie.fau.de/personen/finn-dammann/

-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
dig-geo mailing list
dig-geo at dlist.server.uni-frankfurt.de
https://dlist.server.uni-frankfurt.de/mailman/listinfo/dig-geo