dr. S (Sanneke) Kloppenburg

Sanneke is a sociologist interested in digital infrastructures and their implications for sustainability in everyday practices. Thematically, her work focuses on the domains of energy, circularity, and digital data.

In her current work, Sanneke focuses on how physical infrastructures, like the energy grid and the built environment, become entangled with digital infrastructures, and understanding the tensions and opportunities this brings for sustainability transformations.

Her research revolves around three themes:

1. Energy production and consumption

With the decentralisation of the energy system, energy technologies are increasingly situated in people's everyday environments. Rooftop solar panels and energy monitoring devices, for example, enable people to generate their own green energy and to monitor and manage energy flows at household level. Energy platforms make it possible for householders to share and trade energy, or providing grid balancing services. Moreover, decentralized and distributed infrastructures can be (co-)owned by communities. This line of research investigate how (digital) energy technologies and infrastructures open up possibilities for householders to participate in the energy system and its governance, and the new opportunities and tensions this creates for energy citizenship.

1. Sharing and repairing of consumer goods

Circularity infrastructures is a second empirical theme. Within the ShaRepair Practices project, Sanneke examines how digital-physical infrastructures like sharing and repairing platforms and neighbourhood sharing and repairing hubs can be co-designed and scaled to form new connective tissue for and between circular practices and communities. With this line of research she aims to contribute to accessible and inclusive infrastructures for sharing and repairing.

1.  Digital infrastructures and sustainability governance

The third theme examines how digital technologies and infrastructures affects how environmental issues are understood and governed more broadly. Here, Sanneke looks at emergent technologies such as digital twins and their role in sustainability governance. Her future ambition is to examine data centers. Here, she wants to understand how data centers increasingly put claims on other infrastructure like the electricity and water system, but they also get reimagined and repurposed as waste heat infrastructures.