23–26 Sept 2024
Leipzig, Germany
Europe/Berlin timezone
Welcome to the 2024 T2M Conference – we hope you find the sessions inspiring and the connections invaluable.

Data Mobilities and the Material Geographies of Internet Infrastructures

23 Sept 2024, 15:00
15m
715 (Lancaster University Leipzig)

715

Lancaster University Leipzig

Speaker

Finn Dammann (Institut of Geography, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg)

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.

Primary authors

Prof. Boris Michel (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg) Finn Dammann (Institut of Geography, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg)

Presentation materials

There are no materials yet.