Patrick Brodie

Patrick Brodie (he/him) is a media scholar and Assistant Professor/Ad Astra Fellow in the School of Information and Communication Studies at University College Dublin (UCD). He was previously a FRQSC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University and a Scholar in Residence at Concordia University's School of Irish Studies. He completed his PhD in Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia, and received his MA in Film Studies from Columbia University. His dissertation, which he is turning into a book, unraveled the cultural and environmental entanglements of media and technology industries and their infrastructures in post-financial crisis Ireland. His three ongoing research projects are interested in the environmental politics of digital media infrastructures. The first analyzes the cultural, environmental, and postcolonial geopolitics of data and energy infrastructures across the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland; the second focuses on the "data/energy nexus" in Ireland and its wide-ranging implications for Ireland's climate policies; and the third is a collaborative project with Darin Barney, sponsored by the Grierson Research Group, called Media Rurality, which recenters the rural as an active participant in global media systems. He is also a member of the Global Emergent Media Lab at Concordia and the UCD Centre for Digital Policy.

Contact: Patrick.brodie@ucd.ie

Projects 
Clouds and Bogs: Infrastructure, Data, and Energy across the Irish Border (research project; ongoing) investigates historical and emergent entanglements of data and energy infrastructure across the land border separating the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, looking at how the socio-cultural and political aspects of technological infrastructure and extraction are being navigated in a post-conflict and Brexit environment. The project is supported by an Ad Astra Start-Up Grant at UCD. It was supported by an FRQSC Bourse Postdoctorale from 2021-2022 at McGill. (PI: Brodie)

Wild Tides: Media Infrastructure and Built Space in Post-Financial Crisis Ireland (book manuscript; ongoing) investigates the transnational politics of spatial development in relation to Irish media industries. Across three case studies – the financialized “creative city”; media policy during austerity; and the spatial development and environmental politics of data centers – the book unpacks the logics of infrastructural development which subsume culture, space, and labour into the circulatory values of foreign direct investment. In doing so, Wild Tides identifies a series of pervasive and ongoing naturalizations which condition territories for exploitation and extraction. (PI: Brodie)

Media Rurality (event/edited collection; ongoing) is an upcoming project which confronts the entanglements of media infrastructure with rural places and ways of life. The project gathers scholars from across a number of disciplines, including media and communication studies, anthropology, and geography, in order to unravel the ways in which media systems are constituted by rurality even as they power urban systems. The project will be the subject of an upcoming edited collection. (PIs: Brodie and Darin Barney)

The Data/Energy Nexus in Ireland (research project; ongoing) is a collaboration with Dr. Patrick Bresnihan (Maynooth University) investigating the infrastructural politics, networked operations, and alternative futures of energy extraction and data circulation in Ireland. The collaboration has produced a number of completed and forthcoming publications, and a book manuscript is in the works. (PIs: Brodie and Patrick Bresnihan)

The Labour of Media (Studies): Activism, Education, and Industry (conference/research collective/special issue; completed) was a collective project, designed, led, and run by Concordia PhD students, which confronted issues of precarity at the nexus of academic and media work. Through an international conference in 2018, the initiative spawned a special issue of Synoptique: An Online Journal of Film and Moving Image Studies which included contributions from an array of scholars debating the present and future states of labour in media and academia. (PI: medialabour collective)

Publications 
Bresnihan, Patrick and Patrick Brodie. (Forthcoming). "Data Sinks, Carbon Services: Waste, Storage, and Energy Cultures on Ireland's Peat Bogs." New Media and Society, special issue The Infrastructural Temporalities of Data Centres, edited by Julia Velkova and Jean-Christophe Plantin. (Data/Energy Nexus)

Bresnihan, Patrick and Patrick Brodie. (Forthcoming). “Waste, Improvement, and Repair on Ireland’s Peat Bogs.” In Ecological Reparation: Repair, Remediation and Resurgence in Social and Environmental Conflict, edited by Dimitris Papadopoulos, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, and Maddalena Tacchetti. Bristol University Press. (Data/Energy Nexus)

Brodie, Patrick and Paul O'Neill. (Forthcoming). "Confronting the Regionalism of Amazon Web Services." In Amazon: At the Intersection of Culture and Capital, edited by Paul Smith, Alexander Monea, and Maillim Santiago. Rowman and Littlefield.

Ortar, Nathalie, A.R.E. Taylor, Julia Velkova, Patrick Brodie, Alix Johnson, Clement Marquet, Andrea Pollio, and Liza Cirolia. (Forthcoming). "Powering 'Smart' Futures: Data Centres and the Energy Politics of Digitalization." In Energy Futures: Anthropocene Challenges, Emerging Technologies and Everyday Life, edited by Simone Abram, Karen Waltorp, Nathalie Ortar, and Sarah Pink. De Gruyter.

Brodie, Patrick. (2021). “Hosting Cultures: Placing the Global Data Center ‘Industry.’” Canadian Journal of Communication, special issue Materials and Media of Infrastructure, edited by Rafico Ruiz and Aleksandra Kaminska, vol. 46, no. 2: 151-176. (Wild Tides)

Bresnihan, Patrick and Patrick Brodie. (2021). "New extractive frontiers in Ireland and the moebius strip of wind/data." Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, vol. 4, no. 4: 1645-1664. (Data/Energy Nexus)

Brodie, Patrick and Julia Velkova. (2021). “Cloud Ruins: Ericsson’s Vaudreuil-Dorion Data Center and Infrastructural Abandonment.” Information, Communication and Society, special issue AOIR2020, edited by Jonathan Hutchinson and Aphra Kerr, vol. 24, no. 6: 869-885.

Bresnihan, Patrick and Patrick Brodie. (2021). “Emerging Rural Geographies of Data and Energy in Ireland.” In States of Entanglement: Data in the Irish Landscape. Edited by Annex. Actar Publishers. (Data/Energy Nexus)

Brodie, Patrick and Patrick Bresnihan. (2020). “Data Centres, Renewable Energy, and Rural Politics.” Rupture: Eco-Socialist Quarterly. https://rupture.ie/articles/severed-the-metabolic-rift-between-humans-and-nature-b5x6w. (Data/Energy Nexus)

Brodie, Patrick. (2020). “’Stuck in Mud in the Fields of Athenry’: Apple, Territory, and Popular Politics.” Culture Machine, special issue Media Populism, 19. https://culturemachine.net/vol-19-media-populism/stuck-in-mud-in-the-fields-of-athenry-patrick-brodie/. (Wild Tides) 

Brodie, Patrick. (2020). "Climate Extraction and Supply Chains of Data." Media, Culture and Society, vol. 42, no. 7-8: 1095-1114. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0163443720904601. (Wild Tides)

Brodie, Patrick, Lisa Han, and Weixian Pan, editors. (2019) Becoming Environmental: Media, Logistics, and Ecological Change, special issue of Synoptique: An Online Journal of Film and Moving Image Studies, vol. 8, no. 1. https://www.synoptique.ca/issue-8-1. 

Activity
Co-editor, Journal of Environmental Media – co-editor with Hunter Vaughan and Juliet Pinto of a growing and vibrant journal working at the intersection of media and environmental studies. (2022-2025)

Member, UCD Centre for Digital Policy - a research centre based out of UCD focused on the development of ethical and sustainable digital policy in Ireland, Europe, and beyond.

Member, Global Emergent Media Lab – a research lab based out of the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University, it houses a wide array of research groups, research-creation initiatives, and other events such as screening series, reading groups, and workshops confronting the intersections of global media, technology, and society. As an organizing member of the lab, I was the co-founder and organizer of the Works-in-Progress (WIP) research-creation workshop series. (contact: gemlab.concordia@gmail.com) 

Graduate Student Representative, Media, Science and Technology Scholarly Interest Group (SCMS) – acted as a graduate student representative for a science and technology studies-focused group within the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (2019-2022)

Mitacs Visiting PhD Researcher, Trinity College Dublin, Geography – was a visiting scholar and researcher in TCD’s Geography department (2019) under the supervision of Dr. Philip Lawton. I performed my fieldwork on media industries and infrastructure while based there, organizing visits to data centres, giving guest lectures, and speaking at the Orthagonal Methods Group cluster at the CONNECT Centre.