Across the Layers: Scientific Knowledge Production, Planetary Resources, and Data Centres

The RustLab at Ruhr University in Bochum is holding a running online workshop entitled "Across the Layers: Scientific Knowledge Production, Planetary Resources, and Data Centres" from 20 February to 13 March. Speakers will address questions like: 

  - What are the material impacts of scientific data practices on the planet?

  - In what ways are data centres related to planetary resources and scientific knowledge production?

- How can we think about IT infrastructures as both epistemic and planetary?

  - How do we as scholars deal with and conceptualise our knowledge production as a material and planetary factor?

The Center for Climate IT's Deputy Head of Center Associate Professor James Maguire will be giving a talk entitled "Eco-Tech Imaginaries: Data, Resources, and Future Colonialisms" on 13 March from 16.00-17.00 via Zoom. The talk will revolve around the work of the bio-tech collective Grow Your Own Cloud (GYOC) which, in response to the call for more localised, collectivised, and sustainable digital infrastructures, has produced a series of speculative prototypes that chart the design pathways for storing data in DNA (plants, flowers, forests). Furthermore, Maguire till explore the role of speculative methodologies in imagining more desirable climate futures while engaging critically with the ethical implications of such work.

Anyone is welcome to listen to the talks via Zoom. Zoom link, list of speakers, and abstracts available here.

Living in 3D: Decarbonization, Decoupling, and Degrowth

On Thursday February 23, Dominic Boyer gave a talk entitled "Living in 3D: Decarbonization, Decoupling, and Degrowth". Boyer is a Professor at the Department of Anthropology at Rice University. His research focuses on the study of energy, climate, politics, and society. He recently completed a field research project on the political culture of wind power development in Southern Mexico and is currently researching competing models of electricity provision and their social implications in Europe, the United States, and Latin America. Professor Boyer will be in Copenhagen due to his role as an advisory board member of the Decoupling IT project.

Abstract

In this talk, I discuss the evolution of the high energy growth paradigm of northern modernity through the overlapping energy regimes of new world plantations (sucropolitics), machinic industrialism (carbopolitics) and plastic mobilization (petropolitics) to help identify some of the key areas of intervention for what I term “decompositional politics” (Boyer 2023). Then I turn to a discussion of three key frontlines of decompositional politics today: decarbonization (decomposing the sucro/carbo/petrostate), degrowth (decomposing habits and systems of productivity-for-its-own-sake) and decoupling, which is, in many respects, the most paradoxical and elusive of the three projects. On the face of things, decoupling seeks to emancipate high energy modernity from its burden of ecological unsustainability while promising at the same time to justly secure the pleasures and luxuries of high energy modernity for all. It sounds too good to be true and indeed recent studies cast serious doubt on the reality of decoupling economic growth from carbon emissions. Is this simply another seductive petrocultural mirage? Perhaps. But it is intriguing that some of the more persuasive degrowth proponents seem to see decoupling as a real possibility. One striking consonance between decompositional and conventional politics is the belief that a low energy modernity is not only possible but scalable and sustainable.

PhD Defense: The Role of Human Infrastructure

On 15 February, Hasib Ahsan from the Department of Business IT will defend his PhD thesis entitled:

"The Role of Human Infrastructure: Investigating Digital Interventions in the Global South" 

Examination committee:

Associate Professor Pedro Ferreira, IT University of Copenhagen (Chair)

Researcher and Director Jacki O'Neill, Microsoft Africa Research Institute (MARI)

Professor Andy Dearden, Sheffield Hallam University

Supervisor: Associate Professor Lars Rune Christensen, IT University of Copenhagen

The defense will take place at 1 pm at the IT University of Copenhagen in Auditorium 1, followed by a reception on the first floor of the atrium by the main entrance.

Based on fieldwork in five distinct projects, this thesis investigates the role of human infrastructure in the context of digital interventions in the Global South. The settings are an agriculture voice message service for smallholder farmers in Bangladesh, a climate and agricultural information service associated with weather forecast using phone text messages (SMS) also for farmers in Bangladesh, a for-profit service for farmers in Cambodia using digital applications, a digital mental health intervention for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh and a study of the reordering of everyday life through digital technologies in Bangladesh during the Covid-19 pandemic. The focus on human infrastructure is inspired by research within Information & Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD), Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Science and Technology Studies (STS) and more.

The findings contribute to research and practice by nuancing the understanding of the role of human infrastructure in digital interventions in the Global South. That is, Ahsan empirically and conceptually extends the discussion by pointing out how human infrastructure may be ‘configured,’ ‘trained’ and ‘unravelled’ in the context of digital interventions in the Global South. The thesis shows how one cannot take the human infrastructure for granted in the sense that it has to be both configured and trained and hence is not simply somehow there. Further, the thesis discusses how a human infrastructure may unravel in the context of digital interventions in the Global South and the consequences this may have for continued service provision. These contributions may be useful for both researchers and practitioners as it adds to our understanding of the key role of human infrastructure in digital interventions in the Global South and elsewhere.

PhD Defense: Generation Carbon

On 19 December, Andy Lautrup from the Department of Business IT will defend their PhD thesis entitled:

"Generation Carbon: Loss, goodness and youth climate activism in Norway's oil capital"

Examination committee:
Associate Professor James Maguire, IT University of Copenhagen (Chair)
Associate Professor Gökçe Günel, Rice University
Professor Simone Abram, Durham University

Supervisor:
Professor Steffen Dalsgaard, IT University of Copenhagen

Co-Supervisor:
Associate Professor Rachel Douglas-Jones, IT University of Copenhagen

The defense will take place at 1 pm at the IT University of Copenhagen in Auditorium 0, followed by a reception on the first floor of the atrium by the main entrance.  

The dissertation is available here.

The dissertation explores generational dynamics of youth climate activism in Norway’s oil capital, Stavanger, and the local and situated dilemmas of phasing out fossil fuels in the context of a welfare society that understands itself as enabled by technologies of oil and gas production. Because carbon emissions from oil and gas and their impact on the global climate are one of the most important defining challenges of this generation of young people – in Lautrup's own opinion and in that of the young Norwegians they met – Lautrup names them ‘Generation Carbon’. In the dissertation, Lautrup focuses on climate activism as one response to the predicament of Stavanger’s Generation Carbon.

Drawing on nine months of in-person and online ethnographic fieldwork, Lautrup demonstrates that climate change in Stavanger is causing experiences of loss, demands for technoscientific facticity, as well as shifts and changes in what is regarded as ‘doing good’. Out of the combination of experiences of loss and attempts to realign with a tradition of Norwegian goodness – encompassing the universalist welfare state, environmentalism and peacebuilding – grows an activism with a particular window of opportunity to act on the experiences of loss through activism. 

The central argument Lautrup puts forward in the dissertation is that the oil-saturated social environment of Stavanger produces an activism that works from the theory of change that the future can be refigured through caring for social relations in the present despite radical disagreement. Refiguration is a pivotal way of bringing an undesired future of climate catastrophe back into a shape where it is no longer in jeopardy. This relationship between activism and the future grows out of an implicated and caring activism that acknowledges and works from the premise that it is relationally intertwined with and presently benefits from that which it aims to change.