IS30480 Digital Media & Climate Crisis

Academic Year 2023/2024

How do we make sense of climate breakdown through digital media? In contemporary public life, it is impossible to avoid the discourses (and realities) of the planetary climate crisis. This module will confront the many ways in which digital media and its technologies, infrastructures, and institutions interacts with, communicates, exacerbates, and/or alleviates the collapse of environmental systems. Students will engage with formative theories of environmental media, climate communication, infrastructure studies, and science and technology studies to understand the role that digital media has played and will continue to play in the social, political, and environmental transformations required to manage the effects of climate change. From the global unevenness of environmental burdens being reproduced in the transition to “smart” and “green” technological efficiencies, to environmental impacts and carbon emissions of digital infrastructures like data centres, to the “culture wars” raging in public media debates over the climate crisis, this module situates our current moment within the complex landscape of climate change’s mediation in and through digital technologies. In doing so, it will demonstrate how digital media remains a field of struggle around how we are to imagine different environmental futures on what Anna Tsing refers to as a “damaged planet.”