Join us for a presentation that will draw from Nicole Starosielsk’s forthcoming book, Media Hot and Cold, a feminist and queer rewriting of media theory in the context of digital systems and climate change. It will focus on the thermal regime currently shaping the deployment of digital infrastructure, from fiber-optic cables to data centers. What Starosielski describes as “the coldward course of computing” invisibly and systematically re-embeds network production, distribution, and access into both a colonial geography and into the hands of hyperscale corporate players, including Facebook and Google, all while being legitimated by contemporary environmentalists.

Nicole Starosielski is an associate professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University and an author and co-editor of many books on media, infrastructure, and environments: The Undersea Network (2015), Media Hot and Cold (2021), Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructure (2015), Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment (2016), Assembly Codes: The Logistics of Media (2021), as well as co-editor of the “Elements” series at Duke University Press. Starosielski’s most recent project involves working with the subsea cable industry—which lays the transnational links of the internet--to generate a carbon footprint of the global links of our digital network and to make cable infrastructures more sustainable.

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