Data Ecologies Network
The Data Ecologies Network is a group of humanities scholars and practitioners collectively examining the data economy’s multiple, interlinked sites and scales, from mineral mining sites and processing centers to deployments of militarized AI systems in war zones to e-waste sites.
This project is funded by ISEE and extends the Institute’s mission of addressing the climate and energy crisis, while honoring ISEE's commitment to environmental justice as an issue of social justice. We do so by accounting for the connections between data analytic systems’ environmental impacts, infrastructures, and algorithmic effects.
We are motivated by questions like:
- How can we connect the algorithmic injustices of predictive policing or precision medicine to the environmental injustices of data infrastructures?
- How can we trace the neocolonial logics that link Virginia’s data centers to precarious gig workers across the Global South (who label data and moderate content for machine learning systems), high-tech electronics production in China, and toxic mining and e-waste in the Congo and in Ghana and Pakistan, respectively?
We will respond to these questions through a series of workshops with invited fellows and a public panel in the spring semester.
Co-PIs
Associate Professor, Sociology
and Director, Environmental Humanities Lab, HRC
Fellows
Research Director, Climate and Community Project
Assistant Professor and Ad Astra Fellow, University College Dublin
Associate Professor, University of Texas at Austin
Ph.D. Student, University of Washington
Winship Distinguished Research Professor and Associate Professor, Emory University
Geographer and Professor, Georgetown University
Associate Professor, Simon Fraser University
Associate Professor, University of Pennsylvania
VCU Grad Fellows
MATX
Sociology