I am Assistant Professor at the GPIO and is affiliated with the AISSR programme group on Political and Economic Geographies. My research broadly considers how emerging digital technologies and practices transform people, places and the relations between them. At UvA, I am on the steering board of the RPA AI & Politics, and co-director of the RPA Global Digital Cultures.
My book, ‘Jerusalem Online: Critical Cartography for the Digital Age’, has been published by Palgrave-MacMillan in 2021 and examines the politics of web-maps in/of Jerusalem, drawing on ontological social theory and feminist technoscience. Prior to joining UvA, I held a Fondecyt postdoc fellowship at CIGIDEN / Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, in Santiago.
In 2024, OpenAI removed the clause prohibiting military applications of its technologies. This change signals a broader trend, whereby geopolitical actors use AI to pursue their agendas. My project investigates this trend, combining insights from social science research on AI and critical geopolitics. It focuses on three groups - consultants, academics and companies – with particular influence on geopolitical knowledge. Drawing on discourse analysis and ethnographic observations, it asks: how does AI feature in, and transform, geopolitical storylines? Funded through an NWO XS-grant, the project contributes to the emerging literature on AI geographies, and brings a much-needed critical perspective on societal debates about AI.
Digital platforms, devices, and infrastructures play an increasingly prominent role in national geopolitical agendas. Amid the enduring centrality of US-based tech companies within computing networks, and China's growing influence over different layers of the global stack, many states are grappling with how to assert their digital infrastructural sovereignty. As they try to materialize their digitalization projects, states are required to navigate increasingly tangled webs of global digital power. Our project seeks to understand how digital infrastructural sovereignty is performed and negotiated beyond US-China disputes, at the global, regional, and local levels. With a focus on subsea and subterrestrial cables – critical infrastructures that operate across borders –, we draw on different regional contexts to ask: How do state and non-state actors negotiate their digital infrastructural sovereignty amidst rising tensions between East and West, and persisting geoeconomic asymmetries between the North and the South? We approach this question through different entry points, zooming into the circulating imaginaries and situated practices enrolled in making, maintaining, and governing transnational fibre optic cable networks. The research will contribute to emerging geographical research on digital sovereignty, combining STS sensitivities for situated technological practices with a post-colonial understanding of the macro-political and economic inequalities shaping infrastructural projects and agendas.The project is funded through an AISSR Starter Grant, in collaboration with Virginie Mamadouh, Carolina Maurity Frossard and Pablo Zagt Hernandez.