Digital Fortresses Project

Webinar 1: Space, Land, and Climate

Wednesday 2nd September, 6PM (BST)

Speakers: Enol Nieto Jiménez, Daniel Pena, Helen Pritchard, Nikita Sonavane

Much of the discussion on the environmental implications of digital infrastructure has been limited to the impact of data centres and their abuse of land, water and energy. This discussion hopes to open up a wider conversation around the importance of land and environmental struggles that are inseparable from resistance to the viscerally lethal and exposed elements of today’s digital infrastructures. Through an attention to space, land, and climate, this discussion also hopes to shed light on continuities and ruptures that accompany the development and expansion of digital infrastructures across space and time.

About the speakers:

Enol Nieto Jiménez

Enol Nieto Jiménez is a senior technician and researcher working in the areas of environmental and ecological transition at BETA (Biodiversidad, Ecología y Tecnología Ambiental y Alimentaria) Tech Center. Enol has a degree in Law and Political Science and a Master's degree in Contemporary Studies of Latin America. He has researched in the areas of Political Ecology, socio-environmental conflicts and eco-social crisis. His latest works have focused on the human right to water, their ontologies and social movements, carrying them out through community and participatory methodologies. He has also worked in the legal field, getting involved in open disputes on human rights and environmental law, in different countries of the Global South and in Spain.

Daniel Pena

Daniel Pena is a sociologist and researcher at the University of the Republic in Montevideo and an environmental campaigner. His work has helped shed light on Google's seizure of water in Uruguay.

Helen Pritchard

Helen Pritchard is Professor and Head of Research IXDM, HGK Basel, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland FHNW, whose work considers how computational infrastructures and digital media impact social and environmental practice. Helen works with participatory and creative practice methods for co-research, drawing on trans*feminist and queer approaches. Their research addresses how practices configure the possibilities for life—or who gets to have a life—in intimate and significant ways. As a practitioner they work together with companions to make propositions and designs for environmental media, regenerative energy and computing otherwise, developing methods to uphold a politics of queer survival and practice.

Nikita Sonavane

Nikita Sonavane is a criminal defence attorney and legal researcher. She is the co-founder of the Criminal Justice and Police Accountability Project (CPAProject), a research driven litigation and advocacy intervention focused on building accountability against criminalisation of oppressed caste communities by the police in India. Her research lies at the intersection of caste, policing, and digital datafication in India. Nikita was a Visiting Scholar at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (LCFI) at the University of Cambridge working on a project on biometric surveillance in India. Nikita was awarded a visiting research fellowship at the University of Oxford in 2022 to work on anti discrimination law in India. She was also awarded the Ashoka Fellowship in 2023 for her work with the CPA Project. Her work has been featured in various international and national publications such as Forbes, Economic and Political Weekly, Logic(s) Magazine, the AI Now Institute, the Indian Express among others.

Webinar 2: Invisibilised Sites

Wednesday 9th September, 6PM (BST)

This session aims to speak to the hidden and/or invisibilised sites, labour, and communities integral to the making and upholding of digital infrastructures – as well as their dismantling. Learning from and with worker collectives, community organisers, researchers, and journalists, working to visible and mobilise around submarine cables, supply chains, surveillance networks, and indispensable labour, this session also hopes to bring to the table a rich discussion on lessons in building alternative infrastructures.

About the speakers:

Daniel Selwyn (London Mining Network)

Daniel Selwyn is an educator and researcher with the London Mining Network, a coalition of more than 20 human rights, environmental, and international solidarity groups working with communities around the world affected by the activities of mining companies based in or funded from London. Daniel is also a geography and politics teacher at a secondary school, as well as the Vice-Chair of the National Education Union's International Solidarity Network in London.

Le nuage était sous nos pieds

Le nuage était sous nos pieds is an activist collective based in Marseille organising to expose the local materialities and global socio-ecological impacts of digital infrastructures.

No Tech for Apartheid

No Tech For Apartheid is a worker-led campaign of Google and Amazon workers organising against the companies' $1B Project Nimbus cloud computing contract with the Zionist entity.

Namir Shabibi

Namir Shabibi is an independent investigative journalist working at the intersection of tech and state crime. He is a visiting lecturer in Geopolitics, and a researcher focused on covert intelligence operations in global majority countries. Namir conducts research for Unredacted (an investigative project and archive of UK national security practices) where he co-leads the Working Group on Telecoms, Spyware and Surveillance. In addition to this, he researches and investigates the use of AI and autonomous weapons systems for research and campaign organisations. Namir also undertakes investigative research for legal cases and has served as an expert witness on counterterrorism. He is a former International Committee of the Red Cross delegate investigating breaches of the Geneva Conventions in Darfur and Guantanamo Bay.  

Webinar 3: Imperial Infrastructures

Wednesday 16th September, 6PM (BST)

The third session we will weave together elements from across the webinar series and the project as a whole to discuss the imperial infrastructural dynamics at the heart of the digital fortresses we work to dismantle. Considering how imperial digital infrastructures materialise and formulate across geographies and in local settings, from Ireland to Palestine, this session hopes to shed light on transnational strategies and struggles in solidarity.

About the speakers:

Miriyam Aouragh

Miriyam Aouragh is Professor of Digital Anthropology at the University of Westminster and a leading scholar of media, technology, and colonial power. Her work examines digital infrastructures, propaganda, and resistance, with a sustained focus on Palestine, imperialism, and global solidarity movements. Combining ethnography, critical media theory, and digital data analysis, she has made foundational contributions to the study of Hasbara, cybercide, and digital activism. Miriyam is the co-founder of TITiPI - a trans-practice gathering of activists, artists, engineers and theorists initiated -, and Labor-Tech, - and interdisciplinary and transnational group of experts concerned with technology bringing together scholars, tech workers, union organizers, policy makers, journalists, non-profit researchers, activists. At The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest (TITiPI) — together with Seda Gürses, Helen Pritchard, and Femke Snelting — Miriyam Aouragh convenes communities to articulate, activate and re-imagine together what computational technologies in the “public interest” might be when “public interest” is always in-the-making.

Patrick Bresnihan

Patrick Bresnihan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Maynooth University. He has a PhD in Sociology from Trinity College Dublin (2012) and an MPhil in History from Cambridge University (2007). Patrick's work examines the contested politics of climate, land, and infrastructure in Ireland, and how these speak to broader questions of postcolonial development, dependency and the green transition.

He has co-written two recent books. All We Want is the Earth. Land, Labour and Movements beyond Environmentalism(Bristol University Press, 2023) and From the Bog to the Cloud. Dependency and Eco-modernity in Ireland (BUP, 2025).

Patrick Brodie

Patrick Brodie is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information and Communication Studies at University College Dublin. His research focuses on the environmental politics of digital infrastructures, and specifically the relations and entanglements of internet and other communications technologies with energy systems, global supply chains, and extractivism. He is the author or co-author of three books: From the Bog to the Cloud: Dependency and Eco-Modernity in Ireland (with Patrick Bresnihan, Bristol UP, 2025); Wild Tides: Media Infrastructure and Financial Crisis in Ireland (Duke UP, 2026); and Media Rurality (co-editor with Darin Barney, Duke UP, 2026). His current research focuses on the "geopolitical ecology of AI" in the context of dependency and state industrial policy.

Mona Shtayya

Mona Shtaya is a Senior Advisor and researcher specialising in tech policy, digital rights, and civic space. Mona is joining this event in her own capacity. Her experience includes working on tech policies and driving campaigns with civil society organisations on tech justice. Previously, she held leadership roles as Campaigns and Partnerships Director (MENA) and Corporate Engagement Lead (Global) at Digital Action. Mona focuses on bridging the gap between policy formulation and practical implementation. She has operated across diverse contexts, ranging from safeguarding information integrity during electoral processes to addressing technological harms in conflict zones.

She has served as a Migration and Technology Monitor Fellow (2024) and held non-resident scholar and fellowships at the Middle East Institute (MEI) (2022–2024) and the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy (TIMEP) (2023–2024). Her background includes roles as Head of Advocacy and Communication at 7amleh – The Arab Centre for the Advancement of Social Media, and as a Community Outreach Specialist at Transparency Palestine, the national chapter of Transparency International.

Mona holds a Master's Degree in Social Media and Digital Communication from the University of Westminster.