Please find here the link to a call for papers for a special issue on "Uneven and Contested Geographies of Data Centers" in Digital Geography & Society. 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/special-issue/337501/uneven-and-contested-geographies-of-data-centers

Best regards,
Finn Dammann & Boris Michel

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Uneven and Contested Geographies of Data Centers

In recent years, data centres have become an increasingly common subject of public and political debate. The focus and criticism in these debates are usually directed at the massive consumption of natural resources, their effect on local communities, 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. This special issue brings together contributions on the uneven and contested geography of data centres.

Guest editors:

Dr. Finn Dammann
Institute of Geography, Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany

Dr. Boris Michel
Institute of Geosciences and Geography, Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, Halle, Germany

Special issue information:

This Special Issue aims to understand the unequal, multiscalar, and contested geographies of data centers.

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, to their role in larger infrastructure constellations, urban settings, and geopolitical issues such as digital sovereignty, digital colonialism and data localisation.

This special issue brings together conceptual and empirical contributions to geographical perspectives in critical data center studies and research on the geographies of digital infrastructures. We look forward to contributions from researchers in digital geography, political geography, urban studies, political ecology, science and technology studies, and anthropology, 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 Majority World, 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 data centers.