Convenors
Philip Roberts, University of Amsterdam
philip.roberts22@outlook.com (corresponding convenor)
Domenico Salvatore Galluccio, University of Naples Federico II
domenicosgalluccio@gmail.com
Artificial intelligence has a location. It sits in data centres and substations, cooling systems and fibre routes, and on the land, water and power these require. Such facilities are “not natural or inevitable infrastructural objects” but “constantly shifting ‘relational assemblages’, materializations of particular power relations and imaginaries”, and their siting follows political, climatic and infrastructural promises rather than technical necessity (Edwards et al., 2025). Their temporalities are made at once of “code, routing protocols, data centers, cables, people, network equipment, territories, soil, air, water, energy” (Velkova & Plantin, 2023). This panel follows AI to the ground: to the data centre as one of the instruments that “materially mediate the territorial march of platforms” and “claim, define, and enclose resources and geographies” (Fard, 2026).
It does so at a moment of open conflict. Residents in many countries are contesting new facilities through petitions, planning appeals, public assemblies and moratorium demands, over land and water use, grid pressure and local heat. These are classic ethnographic sites: hearings, kitchen-table meetings, negotiations over compensation, the slow work of assembling a coalition among neighbours who agree on little else. While journalism on this wave is abundant, sustained ethnographic accounts remain scarce (Edwards et al., 2025). The panel treats that scarcity as its opportunity, and welcomes inquiry conducted alongside those mobilising, in the tradition of activist research as a “methodological toolbox”(Martínez, 2024).
One component of this picture is the human labour holding the infrastructure up: construction, maintenance, cooling and security on site, and, along the data supply chain, the annotation and moderation without which models remain unusable: work governed by “an ensemble of discourses, actions, and objects strategically disposed to (re)produce power/knowledge relations in data and labor” (Miceli & Posada, 2022). Land, water and labour alike are “invisible to the making of an object” but “essential to its functioning”, and attending to such absent-present data is what makes asymmetries visible (van Voorst & Ahlin, 2024).
Two commitments run throughout. The digital is better de-centred than placed at the centre, since media are “inseparable from the other activities, technologies, materialities and feelings” through which they operate (Pink et al., 2016), and future visions must be compared with the “everyday realities, power relations and social inequalities” in which these systems are experienced (Pink et al., 2022). Since mobilisation also unfolds online, the choice between provoked data and unobtrusive traces carries ethical weight (Padricelli et al., 2021).
The panel welcomes empirical contributions across disciplines and qualitative approaches, from in-depth case studies to comparative and multi-sited research.
Open questions
- How do the siting and construction of AI infrastructure reshape land, water, energy and everyday life in the places that receive it?
- What is promised to host communities — tax revenue, jobs, modernisation — and what actually arrives?
- Where artificial intelligence ceases to be immaterial, what comes to count as a risk, who is in a position to name it as such, and among whom is it distributed?
- How do local oppositions form, what repertoires and coalitions do they build, and through what work does a technical facility become a political object?
- Who performs the labour that keeps this infrastructure running, on site and along the data supply chain, and how is that labour organised to remain invisible?
- What does it mean to research these conflicts alongside those living them, and what are the possibilities and limits of activist and collaborative research here?
Keywords
Artificial intelligence; data centres; infrastructure; environmental justice; social movements
Sub-disciplines / cross-disciplinary areas
Urban sociology and anthropology; environmental sociology; human geography; science and technology studies; social movement studies; sociology of work and labour studies
References
Edwards, D., Cooper, Z. G. T., & Hogan, M. (2025). The making of critical data center studies. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 31(2), 429–446. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231224157
Fard, A. (2026). Grounding the cloud: Urbanism in the shadow of data. University of Minnesota Press.
Martínez, M. A. (2024). Activist research as a methodological toolbox to advance public sociology. Sociology, 58(4), 832–850. https://doi.org/10.1177/00380385231219207
Miceli, M., & Posada, J. (2022). The data-production dispositif. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 6(CSCW2), Article 460. https://doi.org/10.1145/3555561
Padricelli, G. M., Punziano, G., & Saracino, B. (2021). Virtual vs digital: Examples of netnography and digital ethnography in tourism studies for a comparison between methods. Athens Journal of Social Sciences, 8(4), 259–278. https://doi.org/10.30958/ajss.8-4-4
Pink, S., Berg, M., Lupton, D., & Ruckenstein, M. (Eds.). (2022). Everyday automation: Experiencing and anticipating emerging technologies. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003170884
Pink, S., Horst, H., Postill, J., Hjorth, L., Lewis, T., & Tacchi, J. (2016). Digital ethnography: Principles and practice. Sage.
van Voorst, R., & Ahlin, T. (2024). Key points for an ethnography of AI: An approach towards crucial data. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 11, Article 337. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-02854-4
Velkova, J., & Plantin, J.-C. (2023). Data centers and the infrastructural temporalities of digital media: An introduction. New Media & Society, 25(2), 273–286. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221149945
Convenors’ bio
Philip Roberts studied English Literature at University College London before completing a Master’s in Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. His research interests focus on labor studies and the diverse ways people experience work in contemporary societies. For his master’s dissertation, he conducted ethnographic research on courier workers in the gig economy, examining themes of freedom, precarity, and collective action. Philip’s background reflects a commitment to blending the humanities and social sciences, aiming to bridge literary and anthropological perspectives to better understand social dynamics and labor relations in rapidly changing economic landscapes.
Domenico Salvatore Galluccio is a sociology student at the Department of Social Sciences, University of Naples Federico II. He works in political, urban and comparative sociology, with interests in socio-spatial inequalities, social movements, transdisciplinary knowledge production, and the epistemology of social research. He has contributed to nationally and internationally funded research projects, including research activities with CNR-IRISS, and has worked as a survey enumerator for ISTAT. He has presented and chaired at national and international conferences on algorithmic governance, artificial intelligence, urban space, and commons. He is a member of the International Sociological Association (RC21, RC33) and of IASC.