Speaker
Description
The presentation addresses a current desideratum in critical research on the digital transformation: The foundational infrastructures of digital communication - such as physical cable connections, backbone infrastructures, internet exchange points or content delivery networks - have so far remained largely outside the scope of critical research on digital infrastructures. This is why, for example, anthropologist Corinne Cath recently demanded: "Internet infrastructure must be made visible as a force of political power, as it is transforming the social world, from the bottom up" (2023). Also in geographical research, there are growing calls for more research into the material dimension of data and data flows. Using two research vignettes on Internet interconnection infrastructures in the Mediterranean region and on data centres in the Philippines, we show how postcolonial dependencies are reproduced and transformt in current digital constellations. Building on this, we discuss questions of the resilience of digital infrastructures and the digital sovereignty of North African and Filippino (tech) companies, internet users and state actors.
Biography
Finn Dammann is a research assistant at the Institute of Geography at FriedrichAlexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. His research interests lie in digital geography, GIScience and interdisciplinary infrastructure research. He works on questions of contested spatialities of digital sovereignty in Germany, on new methods at the intersection of GIScience and Critical Cartography as well as on Political Geographies of digital infrastructures.
