Data wastelands: tech extractivism and landscape film in the Irish bogs
Roisin Agnew
Current
This PhD considers the intersection of data centre expansion and environmental governance to examine how Big Tech operates with a colonial logic in Ireland. The research looks at the proposed data centre projects in the Bog Of Allen - Ireland’s largest dead bog, a “brown desert” - as a case study in order to examine the ways in which tech companies shape land commons, local ecologies, and climate goals in the Irish terrain. The research intends to further theorise these by proposing that the rapid expansion of data centres (accelerated by the need for energy-intensive AI-processing) involves a form of environmental degradation best explained by a re-imagining of the metabolic rift, a key concept in Marxist ecological thought that describes the disruption of the exchange between humans and the environment. Drawing on political ecology, technological governance, decolonial practices, and environmental justice, this PhD will examine how Ireland’s case challenges issues of sustainability, sovereignty, and colonial histories. As a practice-led PhD, it will work in a tradition of landscape film in order to explore new ways of conceiving of ‘wastelands’ and how these might inform models of resistance that promote equitable ecological futures.