open reading group infrastructure reading group
bi- weekly tuesday session 16:00 – 17:00 cest/cet* (once every two weeks)
facilitated by niels@criticalinfralab.net
meet up here: https://uva-live.zoom.us/j/6365963924
take notes here: https://pad.criticalinfralab.net/unz6CPM9SpieqIlkXf-Oqg
sign up for the mailinglist here (don’t forget to click the link in the confirmation email):
https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/infrastructure-readinggroup
and a calendar event
March 18th – European Objects and Lifelines of our Society – Chapter 1
April 1st – European Objects and Lifelines of our Society – Chapter 2
April 15th – European Objects and Lifelines of our Society – Chapter 3
April 29th – European Objects and Lifelines of our Society – Chapter 4
May 13th – European Objects and Lifelines of our Society – Chapter 5
May 27th – European Objects and Lifelines of our Society – Chapter 6
June 10th – European Objects and Lifelines of our Society – Chapter 7
June 24th – European Objects and Lifelines of our Society – Chapter 8 and conclusion
July 8th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 1
July 22nd – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 2
August 5th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 3
August 19th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 4
September 2nd – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 5
September 16th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 6
September 30th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 7
October 14th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 8
October 28th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 9
November 11th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 10
November 25th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 11
December 9th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 12
December 23rd – The Invisible Weapon – Chapters 13, 14, 15
books we still hope to read (someday):
- Dalrymple, William – The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company.
- Deudney, Daniel – Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity.
- Diogo, Maria Paula, and Dirk van Laak – Europeans Globalizing: Mapping, Exploiting, Exchanging.
- Knox, Hannah, and Penny Harvey – Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise.
- Long, Pamela O. – Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome.
- Swenson, Edward – Infrastructures of Religion and Power: Archaeologies of Landscape, Ritual, and Semiotics.
- Fickers, Andreas, and Pascal Griset – Communicating Europe: Technologies, Information, Events.
- Högselius, Per, and Erik van der Vleuten – Europe’s Infrastructure Transition: Economy, War, Nature.
- Kaiser, Wolfram, and J. W. Schot – Writing the Rules for Europe: Experts, Cartels, and International Organizations.
- Trischler, Helmuth, and Martin Kohlrausch – Building Europe on Expertise: Innovators, Organizers, Networkers.
previous books read in this reading group:
- The Apple II Age – Laine Nooney
- Telegraphic Imperialism – Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury
- The Smartness Mandate – Orit Halpern
- Technology of Empire – Daqing Yang
- News from Germany – Heidi J.S. Tworek
- balkan cyberia – viktor petrov
- how not to network a nation – benjamin peters
- technologies of speculation – sun-ha hong
- the closed world – paul edwards
- four internets – kieron o’hara & wendy hall
- what is wrong with rights – radha d’souza
- digital design and topological control – parisi
- golden age of analog – galloway
- countering the cloud – luke munn
- medium design – keller easterling
- reluctant power – rita zajác
- between truth and power – julie cohen
- the question concerning technology in china – yuk hui
/* We use CEST between the last Sunday of March until the last Sunday of October, then we switch back to CET
open reading group environment reading group
bi- weekly wednesday session 16:00 – 17:00 cet (once every two weeks)
facilitated by fieke@criticalinfralab.net
meet up here: https://uva-live.zoom.us/j/5689070082 | sign up for the mailinglist here and add you reading suggestions here.
Upcoming readings:
– February 26: There are two readings. The draft position paper of the Waag on regenerative infrastructures (see attached) and ‘The compost engineers and sus saberes lentos: a manifest for regenerative technologies‘ by Joana Varon and Lucía Egana
– March 12: Michelle Murphy ‘Afterlife and decolonial relations‘ and ‘Chemical Regimes of Living‘
– March 26: Elemental infrastructures for atmospheric media: On stratospheric variations, value and the commons by D. McCormack and The Elements of Media Studies by N. Starosielski
– April 9: Anne Tsing ‘On Nonscalability: The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales‘
– April 23: Towards Planet-Proof Computing: Ten Key Elements EU Data Centre Sustainability Policy Should Take Onboard by Jessica Commins and Kristina Irion. They also wrote a blog post about it.
– May 7: Max Liboiron, Manuel Tironi, and Nerea Calvillo ‘Toxic politics: Acting in a permanently polluted world‘
– May 21: Eva Horn ‘Air as Medium‘ and Elemental infrastructures for atmospheric media: On stratospheric variations, value and the commons by D. McCormack
– June 4: Melody Jue and Rafico Ruiz ‘Saturation: An elemental politics’ (introduction) and Yuriko Furuhata ‘Climatic media: Transpacific experiments in atmospheric control’ (introduction).
previous books and articles read in this reading group:
– pollution is colonialism by Max Liboiron
– myth of green capitalism by Katharina Pistor
– from moore’s law to the carbon law by Daniel Pargman, Aksel Biørn-Hansen, Elina Eriksson, Jarmo Laaksolaht, Markus Robèrt
– solarities; seeking energy justice by After Oil Collective
– the value of a whale by Adrienne Buller
– after geoengineering: climate tragedy, repair, and restoration by Holly Jean Buck
– against crisis epistemology by kyle whyte
– discard studies: wasting, systems, and power by Max Liboiron and Josh Lepawsky
– An alternative planetary future? Digital sovereignty frameworks and the decolonial option by Sebastián Lehuedé
– ‘Socialism is not just Built for a Hundred Years’: Renewable Energy and Planetary Thought in the Early Soviet Union (1917–1945) by Daniela Russ
– Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador by Thea Riofrancos
– The Security–Sustainability Nexus: Lithium Onshoring in the Global North by Thea Riofrancos
– The Internet Shutdown and Revolutionary Politics: Defining the Infrastructural Power of the Internet by Michael Truscello
– The world wide web of carbon: Toward a relational footprinting of information and communications technology’s climate impacts by Anne Pasek, Hunter Vaughan, and Nicole Starosielski.
– Shifting from ‘sustainability’ to regeneration by Bill Reed
– A Digital Tech Deal: Digital Socialism, Decolonization, and Reparations for a Sustainable Global Economy by Michael Kwet
– We Need To Rewild The Internet by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon
– Beyond Wiindigo Infrastructure by Winona LaDuke and Deborah Cowen
– How ‘Green’ Computing is Opening Up a New Frontier in Arctic Norway by Janna Frenzel
– A resourcification manifesto: Understanding the social process of resources becoming resources
– What might degrowth computing look like? + Strategies for Degrowth Computing
Water justice and technology. The Covid-19 crisis, computational resource control, and water relief policy
– Draft paper on IETF; framing environmental concerns and sustainability solutions by Fieke Jansen + Solar Protocol: Exploring Energy-Centered Design
– Draft dissertation chapter about the ITU and IETF work on environment-related standards by Kimberly Anastacio
talk - presentation - panel Brown Bag Session on Environment and Tech June 2025
We are at a critical threshold in our computational futures. Investment in artificial intelligence (AI) is booming, and its application across society is accelerating at an unprecedented scale. Meanwhile, we are crossing the boundaries of several life-supporting planetary systems. Devastating heat waves, storms, fires and floods remind us of how human activity impacts all life on this planet.
In this reality, a blossoming community is challenging the tech solutionist approaches from our political and industry leaders and advocates for actual change to ensure that our technologies stay within planetary boundaries. The Green Screen coalition is announcing a series of brown bag sessions to spotlight this work. We hope these sessions provide opportunities to discuss key topics on the nexus of environment and tech with experts, draw inspiration from their work, learn in the open and build pathways to sustainable futures.
Keep an eye on this page for new brown bag session
Upcoming brown bag sessions:
Environmental and Social Impacts of the Semiconductor Industry
June 2, 4 – 5 PM CET
On Zoom – Register now
In this session, Dr. Xiaowei R. Wang and Ann Chen will present their recent publication, Semiconductors: A Field Guide and Julia Hess of Interface will present her research, including the semiconductor data explorer that tracks greenhouse gas emissions from chip production.
About the speakers
Dr. Xiaowei R. Wang is an artist, writer, organizer, and coder. They are the author of Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech In China’s Countryside, a 2023 National Book Foundation Science and Literature Award winner. Their multidisciplinary work over the past 15 years sits at the intersection of tech, digital media, art, and environmental justice. Xiaowei is one of the stewards of Collective Action School (formerly known as Logic School), an organizing community for tech workers, and a faculty member at ELISAVA’s Master in Design for Responsible AI. They have also been a postdoctoral scholar at the UCLA Center on Race and Digital Justice, and an Eyebeam Democracy Machine fellow.
Ann Chen is a Taiwanese-American artist, filmmaker and researcher living between Brooklyn, NY and Taipei, Taiwan. Her art practice begins with embodied, participatory or material research methods to make work about ecologic and geologic systems in connection with lived histories and memories archived in the land. She has taught at NYU Shanghai, NYU and The New School, Parsons School of Design and was an inaugural Fulbright-National Geographic Digital Storytelling Fellow to Canada. She has written for The New York Times, Logic Magazine and Recess Art. She is a senior Civic Media Fellow at Annenberg Innovation Lab at USC, a board member of Triangle Arts Association and a community farmer at Edgemere Farms, in Far Rockaway, Queens, NY.
Julia Hess is Senior Policy Researcher for “Global Chip Dynamics”. Her focus is on the strategic relevance of semiconductors for Europe and the analysis of the global, interdependent value chain – factoring in both its high ecological footprint and dynamic geopolitical realities. Recently, Julia presented her work at the New York Climate Week and to the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy in the European Parliament. Julia has been working at interface since 2019, initially conducting research at the intersection of AI and foreign policy with a focus on AI governance. In 2021, she was a fellow at the Gesellschaft für Informatik’s AI Camp. Before joining SNV, Julia worked in various science and cultural institutions such as the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. She studied media culture and sociology at the University of Cologne and completed her master’s degree in social and business communication at the Berlin University of the Arts.
