Data Centres in Rheinland and Their Relational Agency as Traps
Cultural Studies Salon Seminar with Dr. Estrid Sørensen
Event Details
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Monday, October 5, 2026
7:30 PM - 9:00 PM
City: Peterborough
Traill College
Building: Bagnani Hall
Corsín Jiménez thinks about infrastructures as traps that anticipate and shape agency without fully determining their outcomes. Like traps can misfire or catch wrong things, infrastructures are instable: who is trapping whom remains an open question. Four hyperscaler data centres are planned for the Rhenish Mining Area in Germany. The planning process involves many actors, including industry leaders, politicians at different levels, citizens, planners, protestors, along with zoning plans, land, energy and their histories. Envisioning them as traps and telling their stories reveals the relational agency of industry and state in developing hyperscale data centres; how land captures hyperscalers; citizens become their bycatch; and how hyperscalers are entangled with energy infrastructures continuing or changing across varying histories. The figure of the trap and its inherent instabilities raises questions about vulnerabilities of hyperscalers, and about who is trapping whom in infrastructure arrangements?
Estrid Sørensen did her doctoral studies in Copenhagen and Lancaster and taught sociology of technology and anthropology of knowledge and technology at Aarhus University, at the Technical University Berlin, Humboldt University Berlin and since 2010 at Ruhr University Bochum, where she is full professor of anthropology of knowledge. Founded in Science & Technology Studies she has done ethnographic – and sometimes speculative – research on the materiality of educational practices, on infrastructures of video game harm, on digital methods and on data infrastructures, particularly scientific data centres. She has co-founded Danish and German STS associations and was the secretary of EASST. Since 2019 she is the head of the RUSTlab – the Ruhr University Science & Technology Studies Lab.
https://www.sowi.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/cupak/index.html.en
https://rustlab.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/
Contact Info
This talk will not be recorded.