Short Abstract

Data infrastructures have planetary effects, and they are key to knowledge production. This panel examines worldings around data centres and other infrastructures with a particular focus of how and when their planetary effects and the knowledge outcomes of data practices are co-enacted.

Description

The topic of harmful planetary effects of datacentres and that of questionable epistemic effects of AI have gained considerable attention. This panel thinks of epistemic and planetary effects together, and inquire the worldings their co-enactments generate. We attend to how knowledge produced by way of AI, computational analytics, big data, etc. are related to the planetary effects of their infrastructures, among others of datacentres. Not only scholars, but also organisations, discourses, and politics tend to engage with climate effects of data infrastructures separately from the question of their epistmiemic outcomes. What are the empirical moments and spaces, where epistemic and planetary effects of data infrastructures are enacted together? Such as in popular claims about the equivalence of tea cooking and power used for a GenAI prompt; when revealing that AI is both driven by fossil fuel, and used to discover how to extract oil; when scientists write sleek code that will both generate better simulations and run on less power. What characterises the worldings in which planetarity and knowing are constituted together, through data-oriented scientific, technological, and infrastructural or other practices? What worldings and practices prevent or restrain their co-enactment? What alternative modes of worlding open possibilities for thinking and infrastructuring otherwise in the face of planetary challenges?

We invite both empirical studies and conceptual reflections of such co-enactments and their worldings. We accept contemporary studies as well as historical research. Rather than assuming a linear trajectory from past to future, we propose to approach temporalities of planetary co-enactments as layered, recursive, and speculative. Contributions that address the entanglements of epistemic, material, planetary and temporal dimensions are welcome, just as studies that trace how different sites, scales, and temporalities of data infrastructures produce worldings of knowledge and the planet.

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