Digital infrastructures
Following cables, data centres and platforms to examine who builds connections, controls access and bears their costs.
Explore this inquiryAsia, Africa and beyond
How do digital connections remake territory?
We bring infrastructure, the mobility of people and products, and the circulation of ideas into a shared inquiry into power and place.
Three lines of inquiry
Our research agendaPeople and products
Tracing the labour, relationships and technical work through which people and things move across unequal geographies.
Explore this inquiryIdeas and diplomacy
Examining how cultural forms, standards and models travel, acquire authority and are translated or contested.
Explore this inquiryFrom the essays
All essaysGeopolitics · Publication highlights
Docking tech between China and Kenya
Docking is coordination without consolidation. It allows contradictory technical systems to coexist without formal convergence and without explicit geopolitical alignment. The spatial outcome is what we name atomised territory.
Read the highlightsIn conversation
All seminarsOnline seminar ·
FinTech Capital: Colonial Conditions of Possibility
Paul Langley
Durham University
Opening seminar
This presentation examines FinTech as an emergent mode of capital, constituted through historical financial capitalism and contemporary digital capitalism. Focusing on sub-Saharan Africa, it considers colonial legacies of financial marginalisation and how FinTech can renovate relations of expropriation and value transfer.
Scheduled.
Start: 10:00 UK time.
Hong Kong 18:00 · Hangzhou / Beijing 18:00 · Manchester 10:00 · London 10:00 · Johannesburg 12:00 · Durham 10:00
All times are local on Monday 16 November 2026.
The network
A meeting place for
situated research.
Connecting scholars across geography, international relations, communication studies and science and technology studies.
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All updatesIntroducing The Digital Silk Roads and Beyond
Our website is now open, bringing together the network’s research agenda, members and publication highlights.
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