Current Projects

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

AI Data Centre REsistance & the AI/Energy nexus

I’ve been spending more and more time engaging with communities on the front lines of the AI data centre boom in Canada. I’ve long been interested in data centres as sites where “the cloud meets the ground” and global economic relations connect to regional cultures, grievances, and energy pasts/futures. More and more, these efforts to contest data centre growth are proxies for the desire to refuse the growth of so-called AI more broadly. I’m really interested in how environmentalism is an imperfect but clearly important language for building political coalitions to do this work. So far I’ve written a book and many articles and talks on these themes. In the future I’m looking to work on environmental justice mapping projects and a comparative account of AI data centre politics in Canada and Europe.

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. We’re currently on hiatus.