Deadline for submissions: February 16, 2026
Conference and Session: September 2-4, 2026, London, UK (and online)
We are organizing a session at the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2026 and are looking for contributions
Finn Dammann (finn.dammann@fau.de)
Boris Michel (boris.michel@geo.uni-halle.de)
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@geo.uni-halle.de and finn.dammann@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