Josephine Brandenburg

Since May 2025

Funded as part of the ‘Graduate Centre for Doctoral Students’ of the Bavarian Research Institute for Digital Transformation (bidt)

Since January 2025

Doctoral student in the junior research group ‘Resilience of Digital Infrastructures – Geopolitical Conflicts around Internet Routing’ (BMFTR project), Working Group on Geographies of Digital Infrastructures, FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg

2021-2024

Master of Arts Cultural Geography: ‘Legitimacy of European border protection – The European border protection agency Frontex in crisis’, Institute of Geography, FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg

2017-2021

BA Cultural Geography/Political Science: “Climate refuge to Europe? A discourse-theoretical analysis of negotiations and practices of the EU Commission”, Institute of Geography, FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg

Chilla, T., Bertram, D., Hippe, S. et al. (2023): Grenzraumatlas – Arbeitsmaterialien aus dem BMBF-Projekt Cohesion in Border Regions (CoBo). DOI: 10.12140/RG.2.2.32406.93766

Summer semester 26: Large field seminar: Infrastructural geographies in Marseille and Genoa (together with Dr. Finn Dammann)

I am a doctoral candidate in the junior research group ‘Resilience of Digital Infrastructures – Geopolitical Conflicts over Internet Routing,’ led by Dr. Finn Dammann.

My PhD project, “Contested Infrastructuralisation of Digital Infrastructures in the Western Mediterranean”, lies at the intersection of political geography and digital geography and examines the technopolitics of digital infrastructures, potential dependencies and the infrastructuralisation of clusters in the Western Mediterranean region.

The focus is on the infrastructuralisation of data centres in Southern Europe and the geopolitical implications, as well as potential dependencies of digital infrastructures in Europe and North Africa.

The starting point is the observation that a large proportion of international internet traffic from North Africa is routed via so-called Southern European interconnection hubs, even in the case of pan-African connections. This raises questions regarding North Africa’s digital sovereignty and materialised dependencies, as well as many other issues. Furthermore, in southern European hubs such as Marseille, Genoa and Barcelona, new spatial configurations, social negotiation processes and conflicts are emerging in the wake of the steady growth of interconnection facilities. In the course of my PhD research, I will examine various aspects of these infrastructural dependencies, the discourses surrounding the southern European interconnection hubs, and the geopolitical implications of digital infrastructure. Methodologically, I draw on qualitative approaches as well as GIS-based analyses.

• Speculative Geographies of Data Center Development in the western mediterranean. Annual conference of the Royal Geographic Society 2026 (02.09-04.09) in Lonodn, UK.
• Technopolitics of Data Ports in the Western Mediterreanen, Annual regional Studies Association conference, 15.06.-18.06.2026 in Gothenburg (Sweden) (together with Finn Dammann).
• Sociotechnical imaginations of internet infrastructures: Insights from southern European centres of digital infrastructure development (06.11.2025-07.11.2025), conference of the Digital Geography Working Group in Frankfurt am Main
• Interconnection Hubs, Content Delivery Networks and Emerging AI Infrastructures. Insights into the Material Geographies of ‘digital Ecosystems’ in the Western Mediterranean. Poster presentation at the annual conference of the Royal Geographic Society 2025 (26.8-29.8) in Birmingham, UK.
• Interconnection hubs, content delivery networks and emerging AI infrastructures – insights into the material geographies of digital colonialism in the western Mediterranean region, conference of the Political Geography Working Group, 22–24 May 2025 in Freiburg (together with Finn Dammann)