A talk by Rahul Mukherjee (University of Pennsylvania)
“Ambivalent Sovereignty: Data Localization and Intersecting Energy Cultures”
Time: 4:15pm – 5:45pm
Location: Knox Hall, Room 208, 606 West 122nd Street
Discussant: University Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Abstract: There seems to be a profound ambivalence about digital sovereignty because the India ngovernment performatively stands up to foreign multi-national “Big Tech” companies claiming the right to Indian data while it continues to intrude into the citizens’ bodies through biometric governance, thereby violating their bodily sovereignty and autonomy. Furthermore, acceleration in data localization practices with construction of data centers to keep the data of more and more mobile internet consuming Indian citizens within India could lead to energy extraction practices that may have severe environmental impact. Data centers are energy guzzlers, and in this moment of intersecting energy cultures with rapidly depleting coal and oil reserves and concerns about climate change, data center companies operating in India are increasingly strategizing to capture lands for wind and solar energy projects in the name of “green capitalism” to meet data center needs through carbon offsets. Thinking through entangled questions of energy justice, data privacy and surveillance, and environmental media, this paper connects data sovereignty considerations with data-energy relations to reimagine practices of data storing and processing in the so-called “Global South.”
Rahul Mukherjee is Dick Wolf Associate Professor of Television and New Media Studies at University of Pennsylvania. His monograph Radiant Infrastructures: Media, Environment, and Cultures of Uncertainty (2020) examines debates related to radiation emitting technologies such as cell antennas and nuclear reactors. Rahul is currently working on a second book project Unlimited: Aspirational Politics and Mobile Media Distribution (under contract with MIT Press). He has published papers in journals like Science, Technology & Human Values, Critical Inquiry, and recently co-edited a special issuerelated to Media Power in Digital Asia for New Media, Culture & Society.
