Event – Data Refineries: How Data Centres Make the Politics of AI Visible

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2026 Stapleford Lecture with Dr. Mél Hogan

Data Refineries: How Data Centres Make the Politics of AI visible

Wednesday – 18 November 2026
7:00 PM – 9:00 PM
Education Auditorium
University of Regina

Free Admission – Free Parking – All Are Welcome
Reserve Your Spot

This is a talk about the growing resistance to AI data centre proposals in Canada: how data centers became such a hot topic and what it means to push back against them. Canadians are largely opposed to data centres being built (anywhere, but especially in their communities), while politicians across the political spectrum are selling the public on AI’s inevitability – and local data centres as a way to ensure ‘data sovereignty’ in times of more obvious and overt big tech fascism. This talk puts forward an idea of resistance through conceiving of AI data centers as ‘data refineries’ to more fully understand them as the processing plants they are, converting our (personal, collective) data into products of value for big tech companies.

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Mél Hogan

Associate Prof. Communication, Media and Film at University of Calgary
I am the Director of the Environmental Media Lab (EML: www.environmentalmedialab.com) and an Associate Professor in Communication, Media and Film at the University of Calgary. My work generally focuses on data centers and cloud imaginaries. These days, I'm exploring DNA data storage, and (what I've been calling) "genomic media" -- deployments of DNA for computation and archiving. Since 2015, I've also been teaching and thinking about digital death, the digital afterlife, and new cloud technologies dedicated to death in various ways.

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