Join us for any (or all) of the events as we explore the diverse shapes and forms of platformisation across disciplines and urban geographies. We will also celebrate Andrea Pollio’s latest book, before concluding the week with a brownbag session by Orit Halpern.
Seminar on 25 Feb @ 13h00 – 14h30
Global Platform Studies with Nancy Odendaal, Alicia Fortuin, Marc Steinberg, Ananya, and Armin Beverungen
From short-term rentals to digital dashboards, in the last decade, scholars have charted the wide-ranging impacts of platforms and platformization processes in contemporary society. While this is a global phenomenon, platformization takes different forms – and has different stakes – across urban geographies. At the time, the definition of platforms has differed in different disciplines, for example, between media studies, mainstream economics, heterodox economics, and cultural studies. In this session, the panel will explore some of these differences in both contexts and debates, to make connections and flag disjunctures.
Book launch on 26 Feb @ 17h30 – 18h30
Silicon Elsewhere: Nairobi, Global China, and the Promise of Techno Capital by Andrea Pollio
Mapping the interface between Nairobi as innovation scene and China’s digital presence there, Silicon Elsewhere tells a unique story of ingenuity and adaptation, failure and speculation, and hopefulness and pragmatism. Andrea Pollio’s ethnography draws on interviews with cautious venture capitalists, renegade entrepreneurs, dedicated bureaucrats, and ambitious data scientists to explore the competing meanings of contemporary techno-capital. Moving between leafy coworking spaces and the temperature-controlled rooms of brand-new data centers, Pollio locates Nairobi among the experimental capitals, not peripheries, of technological change in the early twenty-first century.
Brownbag on 02 March @ 13h00 – 14h00
The Planetary Test-bed: Notes to a Theory of Technospheric Governance by Orit Halpern
Orit Halpern will present her work under entitled The Planetary Test-bed: Notes to a Theory of Technospheric Governance. She develops the concept of “technospheric governance” to analyze how contemporary AI platforms for climate modeling, military operations, urban planning, and logistics are forming new knowledges with significant implications for democratic politics. The article traces four interrelated transformations by drawing on case studies of digital twinning initiatives – including the European Union’s Destination Earth, NVIDIA’s Earth-2, and Palantir’s enterprise platforms. By situating these developments within a genealogy extending from Cold War systems modeling to contemporary AI infrastructures, Orit argues that experimentation itself has become infrastructuralized, demanding urgent attention to the politics of technological testing.