The climate impacts of the information and communications technology sector—and Big Data especially—is a topic of growing public and industry concern, though attempts to quantify its carbon footprint have produced contradictory results. Some studies argue that information and communications technology’s global carbon footprint is set to rise dra…[Read more]

As the past years have proven, the methods for conducting and distributing research that we’ve inherited from our disciplinary traditions can be remarkably brittle in the face of rapidly changing social and mobility norms. The ways we work and the ways we meet are questions newly opened for practical and theoretical inquiry; we both need to s…[Read more]

Academics fly a lot: to research sites and archives, to conferences and workshops. Yet flying has many negative repercussions. Air travel has disproportionate climate impacts, and for reasons of time, money, and border security, produces many barriers for marginalized scholars, shaping who is able shows up at conferences and thus, who participates…[Read more]

Climate change is an urgent and unprecedented problem; effectively addressing its challenges requires an ambitious reconfiguration of almost every aspect of contemporary life. Yet, as the past decades of climate advocacy attest, these changes will not be achieved unopposed, nor without significant disruptions to current social relations and…[Read more]

This article names and examines carbon vitalism, a strain of climate denial centered on the moral recuperation of carbon dioxide—and thus fossil fuels. Drawing on interconnections between CO2, plant life, and human breath, carbon vitalists argue that carbon dioxide is not pollution but the stuff of life itself and thus possesses ethical and e…[Read more]

Media saturate our daily experiences. This course attends to the structure and consequences of this fact, exploring the economies, cultural forms, political affordances, and material impacts of media as they are evolving today. It focuses specifically on personal experiences and quotidian examples of these larger forces in order to equip students…[Read more]

A discussion of Open Source Ecology’s combination of open-source hardware development and vision of liberatory technology, interpreted from a critical infrastructure studies perspective.

This essay examines how the fossil fuel energy regimes that support contemporary academic norms in turn shape and constrain knowledge production. High-carbon research methods and exchanges, particularly those that depend on aviation, produce distinct exclusions and incentives that could be reformed in the transition to a low-carbon academy.…[Read more]

Climate communication is seemingly stuck in a double bind. The problem of global warming requires inherently trans-scalar modes of engagement, encompassing times and spaces that exceed local frames of experience and meaning. Climate media must therefore negotiate representational extremes that risk overwhelming their audience with the immensity of…[Read more]

René Descartes posits a curious anxiety his Second Meditation that an otherwise convincing form might conceal a post-human robotic entity. Machinic and animalian bodies, in his dualistic perspective, were seen to exist on a lesser order than the soul of man. Yet, as Descartes himself seems to wonder, the maintenance…[Read more]

Urban Agriculture is increasingly forwarded as a tool for social and ecological renewal in the post-industrial city. However, much of the enthusiasm (and increasingly, scholarly analysis) of this phenomena focuses on its civic role rather than its tangible impacts on urban food systems. This suggests that there is a great deal of ideological…[Read more]