Current Projects

Here’s what I’m working on these days.

Fixing carbon

Fixing Carbon is a book about how we think about carbon. It takes, as its starting point, that this is both hard to do and the subject of significant, unresolved social conflicts. It attempts to assess the contours of the emerging ‘new carbon economy’ by looking to struggles to define and control carbon in the recent past. To this end, it develops several case studies about climate communication and politics and the way that carbon’s materiality as an element provides both challenges and opportunities to those seeking to intervene in the climate system. The book offers a new analytic vocabulary to this end, examining how carbon is ‘fixed’ into different structures of relation, shaping how the element becomes legible and meaningful to different social formations.

A few case studies/communities I study in this project include:

  • Climate skeptics

  • Carbon accountants and net zero corporate initiatives/software

  • Carbon farmers and regenerative agriculture

  • Carbon offsets

  • Standards setting organizations and the politics of footprinting protocols

  • Carbon dioxide removal/geoengineering proposals and start ups

  • Green ICT/debates about whether digital technologies are a net benefit or harm to the climate system

Experimental Methods & Media Lab/Critical Climate TEch initiative

I direct EMM Lab at Trent. It’s a collaborative hub for research-creation and critical making work. In particular, we run DIY Methods, a zine-based conference-by-mail on experimental research methods, and the Critical Climate Tech Initiative, an effort to explore the affordances and aesthetics of technologies currently contemplated in climate models, but largely underexplored in public debates.

Low-carbon methods & media

I coordinate a global research group interested in how we might respond to climate change, not only in our research programs, but also at the level of method. We begin with the suspicion that high-carbon research norms shape the kinds of research and researchers that are over-represented in the global academy, and that a shift to low-carbon methods will have both epistemological and equity gains. We hope to explore this hypothesis across a variety of different disciplinary traditions, culminating in a methods textbook and other provocations for our fields of study.

energy for the war room

I’m slowly writing a paper about the Alberta Government’s ‘Energy War Room’: an incredibly popular election promise to create an agile, risk-tolerant institution to defend provincial oil interests from social media critics. While the realization of this promise has been a bit of an embarrassment to the province, I’m highly interested in the ‘infrastructural imaginary’ this idea represented on the campaign trail. If we take the war room to be continuous with longer histories of public infrastructure built for the benefit of private capital, what does this tell us about the nature of the province and the nation? And, in that context, how do media campaigns promise to potentially resolve the contradictions of such ‘weak’ states?

sustainability and the subsea network

I am a PI on an Internet Society Foundation grant exploring the carbon-intensity and sustainable practices of the subsea telecom cable network (the infrastructure that carries more than 95% of our global Internet traffic, making the web properly worldwide). My research team and I are interested in how we can share best practices and policy across an industry that is, by its nature, positioned between national jurisdictions and in often very remote parts of the world. In turn, this has led us to think about the cable industry’s potential to drive decarbonization in other parts of the ICT sector, changing how we move data and energy around the globe.