CGHR Hosts Bilingual Talks on Grassroots Resistance Against Data Infrastructure

How are communities organising to resist the environmental impact of data-intensive technologies?

How do we engender global solidarity to protect the environment against expansive data centres and infrastructure?

The CGHR is proud to be hosting a series of live talks on Contested Data Territories: Resisting Data Infrastructure from Below.

The environment and local communities, particularly those in the Global South, face potentially damaging consequences as a result of data infrastructure expansions. Activists and researchers from across the world will be joining to discuss the consequences we face, as well as emerging forms of grassroots opposition against these expansions and how they organise on local levels.

This initiative, hosted as a bilingual series of talks incorporating live interpretations in English and Spanish, will raise questions around how collective action can democratise decisions regarding the planning, construction, and deployment of technological infrastructure. Two events, on the 14^th and 21^st September 2022, will be held at 5pm BST or 11am Mexico City. The first session, moderated by our Postdoctoral researcher Sebastián Lehuedé, will focus on the motivations and visions of different groups opposing data infrastructure construction, while the second session, moderated by the MCTD Senior Research Associate Hunter Vaughan, will consider how activist networks put these oppositions into practice.

Get more information on the line-up and sign up here: https://www.dataterritories.net/

'More Data Centres? No' reads the banner in this photo, placed at the entrance 

of the former house of the municipality of the Wieringermeer. On this day the two responsible governors of the now ten years existing municipality of Hollands Kroon received a petition to stop further datacenter building, signed by about 2600 inhabitants of the municipality. (Photo courtesy of the Red de Wieringermeer campaign group)

 

Sign reads 'Danger. No to the Data Centre. Data Theft' (Photo taken by Pamela Ramírez in Santiago Chile