Patrick Brodie, who recently completed his PhD in Film and Moving Image Studies from Concordia and is now an FRQSC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University, has recently co-published a chapter with Patrick Bresnihan (Maynooth University, Ireland) in a new book titled States of Entanglement: Data in the Irish Landscape (Actar Publishing), released on July 1st. The book, edited by Annex Publishers, “draws attention to some of the extraordinary transformations and profound contradictions being brought about by information technologies, decoded from the lens of Ireland’s significant role in telecommunications” (Annex 2021). The chapter by Brodie and Bresnihan is titled “Contested States: Rural Geographies of Data and Energy,” and is their second collaboration. They also co-published the essay “New extractive frontiers in Ireland and the moebius strip of wind/data” in the journal Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space in November 2020.
Dr. Brodie has also recently published in the latest special issue of Canadian Journal of Communication on Materials and Media of Infrastructure. The essay, "Hosting Cultures: Placing the Global Data Centre "Industry"," continues his research into and analysis of the growth of data centres in Ireland since the 2008 financial crisis, using “fieldwork conducted among data centre professionals in Ireland to theorize the relationship between “hosting” and local business culture at the heart of data supply chains.”
Patrick has also written on data centres in Montreal and Sweden, co-publishing an essay in the journal Information, Communication, Society (Vol, 24, Issue 6) with Julia Velkova (Linköping University, Sweden) in April 2021. Their essay, “Cloud ruins: Ericsson's Vaudreuil-Dorion data centre and infrastructural abandonment,” uses site visits, interviews, and press reports, to “propose ‘cloud ruins’ as a sensitising concept to capture some of the specific meanings and material articulations that the abandonment of global data infrastructures may evoke in local contexts” (Brodie and Velkova 2021).
We hope that you'll give these a read and join us in congratulating Dr. Brodie!