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.

green data capitalism

Book project #2 (ok, yes, I do need to finish book project #1 first!) will likely be an effort to ponder what the phenomena of ‘green data capitalism’ means and does. By this term I want to name a strategy of accumulation used by an increasing number of tech companies that aim to promote and profit from an economic trajectory that depends on the collection and management of environmental and energy data. There’s a lot of that data out there—perhaps an unending amount?—that we might need to monitor and coordinate the work of climate action and renewable energy, and I’m interested in what happens when that data sits in private hands and on private platforms. I’m also interested in naming the political coalitions developing between big tech and climate action, pondering how either side is reimagining the moral and material projects of capitalism on a warming planet. It’s early (but interesting!) days for me contemplating this line of thought. (I still have qualms about the project of ‘capitalism with adjectives’ but everyone (including tech sector leaders) keep popping ‘em out….)

sustainability and the subsea network

Was 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). That work is ongoing still. Industry partners and our research team 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.