14.10. Human entanglements with data infrastructures – masterclass with Rob Kitchin
Kathryn Conrad & Rose Willis / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Date & Time: October 14, 2025, 12:00-16:00
Location: Porthania P722 (Yliopistonkatu 3, Helsinki)
We warmly welcome everyone to attend this masterclass with professor Rob Kitchin (Maynooth University). The session explores how data infrastructures that organise, circulate and govern data across contemporary life are currently developed and worked with. Through presentations and discussion, we will consider how human practices, institutions and values become entangled with technical designs, and what these entanglements mean for power, accountability and care in digital societies.
No registration required.
Programme
12:00 Introduction to the day
12:20 Postdoctoral Researcher Sanna Vellava (University of Helsinki): Data centre (de)politicisation in Finland – observations from the field
13:00 Project Researcher Essi Iisakka (University of Eastern Finland): Sociotechnical imaginaries of data-driven work in welfare services
13:40 Coffee break
14:00 Doctoral Researcher Zhuo Chen (University of Helsinki): Chasing the City Brain – visions, knowledge, and materiality of intelligent urban infrastructure in a Chinese tech hub
14:40 Postdoctoral Researcher Laura Savolainen (University of Helsinki): Modes of veridiction and epistemic conflation in machine learning training
15:20 Wrap-up & takeaways
Rob Kitchin is a professor in the Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute and Department of Geography. His research examines the production of digital geographies and his present ERC-funded project (2022-27) is ‘Data Stories: Telling Stories About and With Planning and Property Data’. He is the (co)author or (co)editor of 37 academic books and (co)author of over 250 articles and book chapters, and is an editor of Dialogues on Digital Society. He is a recipient of the Royal Irish Academy’s Gold Medal for the Social Sciences.