Data Centres and the City: A Critical Mapping Workshop

This workshop engages with critical mapping as means to examine cultural and social meaning making and contestation around technology. Convenor: Nancy Salem Nancy Salem is a Research Associate at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH). She completed her PhD at the Oxford Internet Institute where her research examined how futurity, crisis, health, and the body are articulated in relation to emerging technologies. Her recent work is focused on the technopolitics of health under austerity. Description Data centres are generative analytical spaces for exploring the material realities of ecology and empire, global capitalism and labour relations, and urban life and inequality. In recent years, they have emerged as key sites of contestation against digital technologies: concerns over electricity and water usage, noise pollution, and structural health and housing crises have framed collective organising against data centres in cities. They have also served as a discursive focus of larger concerns around tech monopolies, surveillance, and data economies. This workshop engages with critical mapping as means to examine cultural and social meaning making and contestation around technology, drawing from recent investment plans in, and campaigns against, data centres. Participants will be introduced to core concepts in critical cartography and countermapping, understanding maps less as neutral representations of reality and more as exercises of power and knowledge production. This workshop moves beyond spatial data to explore how oral histories, archival images, and social media data have been used to map people, places, and events. Is any equipment or Software required? Participants will need to bring their own laptop. Target Audience Our CDH Methods workshops have limited places and are prioritised for students and staff at the University of Cambridge. However, if space is available, we welcome all participants who want to learn and apply digital methods and use digital tools in their research. This session may be of particular interest to: • PhD students in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences • Early Career Researchers in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Contact CDH If you have specific accessibility needs for this event, please get in touch. We will do our best to accommodate any requests, however please note that the building is grade 2 listed and has 4 steps into the building so unfortunately wheelchair access is not available. This workshop is part of our Methods Fellowship programme, which develops and delivers innovative teaching in digital methods. You can read more about the programme here and view the complete series of workshops here.