Oxford Digital Ethnography Group Seminar Series

Fibre in a faraway place: continuity, change, and future-making on Haida Gwaii

About

The islands of Haida Gwaii, ancestral homeland of the Haida Nation, are a mountainous and heavily-forested archipelago of more than 150 islands in the North Pacific. Owing to the islands’ small population base, geographic isolation, and propensity for wild and unpredictable weather, providing internet connectivity to the people of Haida Gwaii has historically been a challenging affair, relying primarily on an ageing assemblage of fixed wireless (e.g. MDR) broadband systems. In September 2022, however, this changed rather suddenly, as a community-owned ‘full fibre’ network decades was initiated, extending Gigabit-capable connectivity to every endpoint on-island. Building off of ongoing fieldwork engagements with broadband activists and engineers on Haida Gwaii, this talk will offer a ground-level perspective on a community making sense of and getting used to a new set of infrastructural realities. By surfacing certain frictions entailed by the ostensible ‘completion’ of the islands’ fibre network – in particular, the ongoing need for repair and maintenance – this talk will consider how the promises of a post-bandwidth era often exist at-odds with the lived realities of its emergence.

 

Speaker biography

Dr Tomas Walker-Borsa is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics whose research explores the infrastructural politics of fibre-optic infrastructures in non-urban contexts. He is an adopted member of the Skidegate Gidins/Naa ‘Yuuwans Xaaydaga (Big House People) clan of the Haida Nation, and holds a Double BA in Political Studies and Psychology from the University of Saskatchewan, MSc in Politics and Communication from LSE, and DPhil in Information, Communication, and the Social Sciences from the Oxford Internet Institute. Dr Walker-Borsa’s doctoral dissertation, ‘Future Proof: the Meanings and Makings of The Fibre Project on Haida Gwaii’, provided a critical ethnography of the planning, construction, maintenance, and situated usages of a ‘full-fibre’ (FTTP) network on the islands of Haida Gwaii, and received the 2025 Dissertation Award from the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR).

 

For inquiries, please email: boxi.wu@oii.ox.ac.uk or yanqing.wang@oii.ox.ac.uk