Patrick Brodie

Patrick Brodie (he/him) is a media scholar and Lecturer/Assistant Professor (Ad Astra Fellow) in the School of Information and Communication Studies at University College Dublin. He was previously an 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. His research broadly focuses on the environmental politics of media, data centres, and energy infrastructures. 

His current project confronts the cross-border politics of digital and energy systems in Ireland through the lens of supply chain justice and green extractivism, with attention to the postcolonial residues and environmental struggles of rural communities.

He is currently working on a manuscript, based on his doctoral research, entitled Wild Tides: Media Infrastructure and Financial Crisis in Ireland. His research has appeared and is forthcoming in New Media and Society, Information, Communication, and Society, Media, Culture, and Society, Culture Machine, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, among other venues. He has written editorials on data and energy politics in The Irish Times, Journal.ie, and Rupture: Eco-Socialist Quarterly. He is a member of the Grierson Research Group at McGill, and was the co-convener of the Media Rurality colloquium at McGill in 2022, co-sponsored by the GEM Lab.

Patrick Brodie was the co-founder and former organizer of the Works-in-Progress series. He was part of the organizing committee for The Labour in Media (Studies) Conference. 

Recent 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 and Imaginaries of Data Centres, edited by Julia Velkova and Jean-Christophe Plantin. 

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 Alexander Monea, Maillim Santiago, and Paul Smith. Rowman Littlefield. Link.

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. Link.

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. Link. 

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. (*winner of the Media Industries SIG of SCMS Graduate Student Paper Award). Link. 

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. Link. 

Brodie, Patrick. 2020. “’Stuck in Mud in the Fields of Athenry’: Apple, Territory, and Popular Politics.” Culture Machine, special issue Media Populism, edited by Giuseppe Fidotta, Joshua Neves, and Joaquin Serpe, vol. 19. (*winner of the Media Industries SIG of SCMS Best Article/Chapter Award). Link. 

Brodie, Patrick. 2020. “Climate Extraction and Supply Chains of Data.” Media, Culture and Society, vol. 42, issue 7-8: 1095-1114. (*winner of FRQSC Relève étoiles Paul-Gérin-Lajoie, Concordia Stand-Out Graduate Research Award, and the Media, Science, and Technology SIG of SCMS Graduate Student Paper Award). Link.