people
Julia Velkova (PI) is a media and communications scholar and associate professor at the Department for Thematic Studies – Technology and Social Change, Linköping University. She studies media infrastructures — from software and algorithms, to data centers and telephone cables — and the politics of their making and unmaking. She is also currently a ProFutura Scientia fellow with the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies.
In the Megabytes and Megawatts project Julia explores the local politics and relations between big wind and big data enabled through Google PPA agreements in Jämtland, mid Sweden. She also studies the politics of dismantling data centers when they are used as energy infrastructure.
This is her institutional website and this is her personal one: www.juliavelkova.org.
Forthcoming book: Media Backends (co-edited with Lisa Parks and Sander De Ridder)
Laura Watts (Co-I) is an ethnographer of futures, author, and Visiting Professor at the Department for Thematic Studies – Technology and Social Change, Linköping University. As a scholar in Science Technology Studies (STS) she has spent the last two decades exploring how energy and tech futures get imagined in made in landscapes at the edge, as well as methods for writing futures otherwise.
Building on her experiences as a consultant on energy data governance, and community-led virtual power plants, her work on Megabytes and Megawatts explores the cultural intersection between the energy and data industries, particularly as it is manifest in NetZero infrastructure imaginaries and implementation.
Website: https://sand14.com
Lastest book: Energy at the End of the World
Flora Mary Bartlett (Co-I) is a visual and environmental anthropologist, photographer, and postdoctoral researcher at the Department for Thematic Studies – Technology and Social Change, Linköping University. She studies landscape relations and sustainable imaginaries in rural Sweden, using co-curatorial research practice and creative visual methodologies to bring the environment into image making.
In Megabytes vs Megawatts she examines the emerging relations and frictions as rural Swedish landscapes are re-imagined in the transition to digitization and renewable energy futures.
Latest Publications
Bartlett, Flora Mary. 2023. ‘Visualizing the Pristine: The Role of Imagery in Local Stewardship of Landscape’. In Disturbed Ecologies: Geopolitics and the Northern Landscape in the Era of Environmental Crisis, edited by Chris Goldie, Julia Peck, and Darcy White.
Bartlett, Flora Mary. 2023. ‘Freezers Full of Gold: Living well with landscape in rural Northern Sweden.’ In Kulturella perspektiv – Cold, Cooling, and Freezing in Nordic Contexts (Special Issue 2023 edited by Matilda Marshall and Inger-Johanne Lyngø). DOI: 10.54807/kp.v32.2173
Harald Rohracher (Co-I) Harald Rohracher is Professor of Technology and Social Change at Linköping University. He has been co-founder and director of the Inter-University Research Centre for Technology, Work and Culture (IFZ), Graz, Austria (1999-2007), Joseph A. Schumpeter Fellow at Harvard University (2009-10) and Simon Visiting Professor at Manchester University (2013). In his research he is interested in the governance of transformative socio-technical change, in particular urban sustainability transitions, transformative innovation policies, and implications of the digitalisation of the energy system.
Johanna Sefyrin (Co-I) is senior lecturer in informatics/information systems and studies practices, relations and stories concerning design, use and consequences of digital technologies. She has been focusing on questions about what and who becomes visible in relation to digital technologies, with a focus on gender, participation, power and knowledge. In the Megabytes and Megawatts project Johanna focuses on local and global relations of just and sustainable digitalization starting with a planned datacenter in Jämtland, Sweden.
Ulf Melin is a professor of information systems and his research interest is focused on different aspects of digitalization including public sector digitalization, digital services, change, (open) data and governance.