[Air-L] E-waste exhibit in Philadelphia during AoIR 2023

[Cooper, Zane Griffin Talley]

Hello friends,

Wanna see some trash while in beautiful Philly for AoIR 2023? Well you're in luck!

We are proud to announce the premiere of our multi-sited, collaborative exhibit funded by the Internet Society Foundation, Geographies of Digital Wasting: Electronic Waste From Mine to Discard and Back Again! It runs from October 16-25 at the Annenberg School for Communication (3620 Walnut St, the forum, 1st floor), and there will be a public reception with the research team on October 20th from 5-7pm. Please come join us!

The broader questions raised through this long gestating collaboration also inspired the topic and form of this year's plenary panel on possible imaginaries of a "green revolution" for the internet - a conversation I, for one, am extremely excited about. What does a green internet even mean in the first place? Let's talk about it. It's gonna be good.

Here is a short description of the exhibit and a link to more info. We hope to see you there and look forward to many fruitful discussions!

https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/events/geographies-digital-wasting-electronic-waste-mine-discard-and-back-again

This exhibit brings together a transnational team of researchers, funded by the Internet Society Foundation and supported by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at Annenberg, to present findings from a two-year-long study on the global flows of e-waste. The exhibit draws connections between the four primary sites that underpin the research project, each related to a section of the tech supply chain, including: extraction of rare earth minerals in South Greenland, waste produced in silicon chip manufacturing in Taiwan and Silicon Valley, waste produced by logistics and industrial cloud computing in the United States, to the environmental and health-related impacts of e-waste processing and dumping sites in Zimbabwe. The exhibit includes photography from each site, video essays, activist media such as zines, and traditional scholarly research posters.

Because e-waste is the fastest waste stream on the planet and because there are known global inequities in where and how it accumulates and how it flows through and between global sites, it is imperative that we address this issue through a transnational perspective. The implications of connection-making across contexts in our research cannot be overstated: as climate change continues to shape life on our planet, we know that its effects will be distributed disproportionately along political, racial, and economic lines. This exhibit tells the story of the global processes of digital wasting with the aim of informing policy and practices to combat the climate injustices associated with e-waste.

All the best,

Zane Cooper and Lauren Bridges