Cloud-ed Frontiers: Infrastructures of Corporate Power in the Age of AI
hosted by Professor
Sarah E. Parkinson
Sarah El-Kazaz
Associate Professor
Amazon, Google and Microsoft have built global Cloud and AI infrastructures that extend from Sydney to Cape Town to Sao Paolo. What does following Big Tech's global Cloud infrastructures tell us about the nature of digital corporate power? Centering vulnerability in unmasking corporate power, the seminar deploys multi-sited field research conducted in Cape Town, Dubai, Johannesburg, London and San Jose to trace how tech giants navigate obstacles to building cloud infrastructures. Rather than defensively shrinking or pivoting their operations, digital corporations energetically embraced vulnerabilities as opportunities for expansion into new and unexpected frontiers extending their tentacles into fields as diverse as concrete manufacturing, nuclear energy and carbon credits. In their frontierism, tech giants are getting their hands dirty and modelling imperial and securitizing logics of colonial extractive corporations and oil conglomerates, unsettling core tenets of theorizing digital corporate monopolism from pristine and immaterial platforms.
Sarah El-Kazaz
Sarah El-Kazaz is Associate Professor in the politics department at SOAS, University of London and Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow. She is the author of Politics in the Crevices: Urban Design and the Making of Property Markets in Cairo and Istanbul (Duke UP, 2023). Her new book project investigates the politics of digital infrastructures by following "Cloud" technologies across the Global South and is supported by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. Her work appears in peer-reviewed journals including: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Economy and Society, the International Journal of Middle East Studies and City and Society. She is co-convenor of the public seminar series on Histories of Capitalism and Race in the Middle East and Beyond through the Walter Rodney Collective at SOAS, co-founder of the Urban Political Research Network housed in the Beirut Urban Lab and is on the editorial board of Economy and Society and editorial team of the Arab Studies Journal. She previously taught at Oberlin College, and completed a PhD at Princeton University.
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