publications
by Donya Alinejad

EDiting Special Issue on Platforms and Climate Crisis

Together with my wonderful colleagues from the Greening the Digital Society Special Interest Group at Utrecht Uni, I’m currently co-editing a special issue for the journal Platforms & Society. See the full call, below. Very excited to read the submissions in May!

Call for Papers

Greening the Digital Society: Platforms, Sustainability & the Climate Crisis

Editors: Rianne Riemens, Donya Alinejad, Judith Keilbach, Anne Helmond (Utrecht University)

Rationale: Digital technologies, including cloud services and artificial intelligence (AI), are often framed as indispensable allies in the fight against climate change. At the same time, these technologies have an enormous negative environmental impact through their high demands for energy, water, and their reliance on critical raw materials. In recent years, tech companies have increasingly positioned themselves as environmentally responsible actors, working towards decarbonizing their businesses. However, these same companies have reported rising emissions linked to their AI products, still depend on fossil fuels, and continuously expand their infrastructures. Meanwhile, as knowledge brokers, they fail to address climate disinformation circulating on their platforms. Nevertheless, sustainability scholarship has a demonstrated tendency to celebrate platforms as drivers of sustainable societal change (Kuntsman and Rattle 2019; Mouthaan et al., 2022).

This special issue invites contributions that critically engage with the complex and often contradictory relationship between platform companies, the climate crisis, and the pursuit of just, sustainable futures. We seek papers that explore the role of platform companies in the challenge of greening the digital society.

Infrastructures and platform power

The special issue aims to bring together papers that speak to and connect several research fields. The growing field of environmental media studies has long addressed the materiality of media (Maxwell and Miller, 2012; Parikka, 2015), the environmental dimensions of the IT sector and infrastructures like data centers (Bresnihan and Brodie, 2023; Hogan, 2015; Pasek et al., 2023; Velkova, 2021) and the climate impact of AI (Crawford, 2021; Valdivia, 2024; Van Wynsberghe, 2021).

At the same time, platform studies has conceptualized the “platform” as a dominant infrastructural and economic model, producing layered understandings of “platform power” (van Dijck et al., 2018; Nieborg et al., 2024; van der Vlist & Helmond, 2021). The climate crisis and initiatives around green “transitions” ask for new perspectives on how this power operates. Scholars have pointed to the destabilizing effects of “green extractivism”, and the coloniality of practices emerging in name of the energy transition, which intensify the extraction and use of minerals, energy, water, space etc. (e.g. Andreucci et al. 2023; Brodie 2024; Lehuedé, 2024). How are Big Tech and platform companies contributing to climate change? In what way are they complicit in extractive practices in the Global South? How should we approach these issues across different scales–technological, geographical, political, or otherwise? And where and how are forms of resistance emerging?

Discourses and knowledge production

The role of platforms in the climate crisis is not only economic and infrastructural but also discursive. Through their corporate communication, tech companies promote the platform society as a greener society. AI tools, for instance, are promoted and hyped as means to “accelerate” a green transition, as part of tech companies’ tech- and data-for-good agendas (Espinoza & Aronczyk 2021; Markelius et al., 2024). However, these green PR practices are intertwined with but do not always align with material realities, and platform companies are currently reconfiguring their position in light of rapid (geo)political changes.

As cultural and economic actors, platform companies and prominent tech figures have the power to shape the ways in which the climate crisis, as well as potential solutions, are discussed. Platforms for example shape how climate change becomes knowable to online publics, scientific communities, policymakers, advocates/activists, and journalists. Media scholars have convincingly theorized commercial platform media’s epistemic influences (Neuberger et al. 2023), arguing that knowledge hierarchies have been significantly flattened as a result of platform’s systemic influences. This general development is compounded by platforms introducing machine learning AI and user-led interventions for content moderation, reigniting questions about how digital technologies are shaping what counts as knowledge (Haggart and Tusikov 2023; Beer 2023; Gillespie et al. 2014). How do platforms intervene in transmitting, concealing, producing, and authorizing knowledge about climate change and related topics?

Reconsidering methods and new interdisciplinary approaches

The special issue further seeks to reflect on methodological and conceptual challenges in studying platforms in relation to sustainability. Contemporary platform technologies are embedded within everyday practices, cultural imaginaries, institutional policies, and systems of power. This requires approaches that move beyond isolated case studies of platforms and instead develop broader analyses that trace how infrastructures, platform power, discourses and knowledge production intersect with the climate crisis. This methodological challenge is amplified by the complexity of climate change itself–an ongoing process unfolding at different ecological scales, from local ecosystems to global systems. Platform studies is already an interdisciplinary field, but how well do its current tools, methods, and concepts equip us to address these challenges? What new collaborations and approaches might be needed to adequately study platforms’ roles in environmental futures?

In sum, this special issue asks: How does the role of platform companies—ranging from Big Tech firms to AI startups, chip manufacturers, and cloud infrastructure providers—in the climate crisis call for new perspectives on platform power and its environmental impact? How can we analyze the infrastructural, political, and cultural power of the “new conglomerates” (Srnicek, 2024), particularly in their roles as knowledge brokers or energy intermediaries? Can we speak of a “platformization” of the climate crisis (Helmond, 2015), and if so, what does that entail? And how do these changes occur in different geographical contexts or parts of the supply chain?

We invite contributions from a diverse group of authors using a range of methods, working in different regional and institutional contexts, and focusing on a variety of case studies.

Possible topics include:

  • Methods and approaches for studying the environmental impact of digital platforms;
  • Sustainability and waste across data infrastructures and the stack;
  • Tech companies and CEOs as environmental actors;
  • Theorizations of green platform capitalism and “green extractivism”;
  • Digital platforms and the production, dissemination, and control of climate knowledge;
  • The political economy of Big Tech and energy provision/distribution (wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear, fossil fuels) across different scales;
  • Sustainability as a “hype” and platforms’ corporate greenwashing;
  • Corporate environmentalism of Big Tech versus state politics (e.g. national public–private partnerships, friction in local contexts, lobby practices);
  • Big Tech and climate justice movements (including local and Global South resistance);
  • Visions and imaginaries of a green platform society.

Deadlines: Interested authors are invited to submit abstracts (400-500 words excl. references) to r.riemens@uu.nl until May 5th. After acceptance, authors will be asked to discuss first full drafts of papers during a hybrid workshop in January 2026, with official submissions due in March 2026. We aim to publish the special issue in Platforms & Society in winter 2026/2027.

References

Andreucci, D., et al. (2023). “The coloniality of green extractivism: Unearthing decarbonisation by dispossession through the case of nickel.” Political Geography 107(102997): 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2023.102997 

Beer, D. 2023. The Tensions of Algorithmic Thinking: Automation, Intelligence and the Politics of Knowing. Bristol, UK: Bristol University Press.

Bresnihan, P. & P. Brodie (2023). “Data Sinks, Carbon Services: Waste, Storage and Energy Cultures on Ireland’s Peat Bogs.” New Media & Society 25(2): 361-383. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221149948 

Brodie, P. (2024). “Smarter, greener extractivism: digital infrastructures and the harnessing of new resources.” Information, Communication & Society: 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2024.2341013 

Crawford, K. (2021). Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. New Haven, Yale University Press.

Espinoza, M. I. & M. Aronczyk (2021). “Big data for climate action or climate action for big data?” Big Data & Society 8(1): 2053951720982032. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951720982032 

Gillespie, T., P. J. Boczkowski & K. A. Foot, eds. 2014. “The Relevance of Algorithms.” In Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society. The MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262525374.001.0001

Haggart, B. & N. Tusikov. 2023. The New Knowledge: Information, Data and the Remaking of Global Power. Digital Technologies and Global Politics. Lanham Boulder New York London: Rowman & Littlefield.

Helmond, A. (2015). “The Platformization of the Web: Making Web Data Platform Ready.” Social Media + Society 1(2): 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115603080 

Hogan, M. (2015). “Data Flows and Water Woes: The Utah Data Center.” Big Data & Society 2(2): 1-12.  https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951715592429 

Kuntsman, A. & I. Rattle. 2019. “Towards a Paradigmatic Shift in Sustainability Studies: A Systematic Review of Peer Reviewed Literature and Future Agenda Setting to Consider Environmental (Un)Sustainability of Digital Communication.” Environmental Communication 13 (5): 567–81. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2019.1596144 

Lehuedé, S. (2024). “An elemental ethics for artificial intelligence: water as resistance within AI’s value chain.” AI & Society: 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-024-01922-2 

Markelius, A, C. Wright, J. Kuiper, N. Delille & Y. Kuo. (2024). “The Mechanisms of AI Hype and its Planetary and Social Costs.” AI and Ethics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-024-00461-2 

Maxwell, R. & T. Miller (2012). Greening the Media. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Mouthaan, M., Frenken, K., Piscicelli, L., & Vaskelainen, T. 2023. “Systemic sustainability effects of contemporary digitalization: A scoping review and research agenda.” Futures, 149(103142). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2023.103142 

Neuberger, C., A. Bartsch, R. Fröhlich, T. Hanitzsch, C. Reinemann & J. Schindler (2023). The digital transformation of knowledge order: a model for the analysis of the epistemic crisis, Annals of the International Communication Association, 47:2, 180-201. https://doi.org/10.1080/23808985.2023.2169950 

Nieborg, D., et al. (2024). “Introduction to the special issue on locating and theorising platform power.” Internet Policy Review 13(2): 1-17. https://doi.org/10.14763/2024.2.1781 

Parikka, J. (2015). A Geology of Media. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.

Pasek, A., H. Vaughan & N. Starosielski (2023). “The World Wide Web of Carbon: Toward a Relational Footprinting of Information and Communications Technology’s Climate Impacts.” Big Data & Society 10(1): 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517231158994 

Srnicek, N. (2024). “The new conglomerates.” Platforms & Society 1. https://doi.org/10.1177/29768624241255309 

Valdivia, A. (2024). “The Supply Chain Capitalism of AI: A Call to (Re)think Algorithmic Harms and Resistance through Environmental Lens.” Information, Communication & Society: 1-17.  https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2024.2420021 

Van der Vlist, F. N. & A. Helmond (2021). “How partners mediate platform power: Mapping business and data partnerships in the social media ecosystem.” Big Data & Society 8(1): 1-16.  https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211025061 

Van Dijck, J., T. Poell & M. de Waal (2018). The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Van Wynsberghe, A. (2021). “Sustainable AI: AI for sustainability and the sustainability of AI.” AI and Ethics 1(3): 213-218. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-021-00043-6 

Velkova, J. (2021). “Thermopolitics of Data: Cloud Infrastructures and Energy Futures.” Cultural Studies 35(4-5): 663-683. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2021.1895243