critical infrastructure lab

bi- weekly tuesday session 16:00 – 17:00 cest/cet* (once every two weeks)
facilitated by niels@criticalinfralab.net

meet up here: https://uva-live.zoom.us/j/6365963924
take notes here: https://pad.criticalinfralab.net/unz6CPM9SpieqIlkXf-Oqg
sign up for the mailinglist here (don’t forget to click the link in the confirmation email):
https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/infrastructure-readinggroup
and a calendar event

March 18th – European Objects and Lifelines of our Society – Chapter 1
April 1st – European Objects and Lifelines of our Society – Chapter 2
April 15th – European Objects and Lifelines of our Society – Chapter 3
April 29th – European Objects and Lifelines of our Society – Chapter 4
May 13th – European Objects and Lifelines of our Society – Chapter 5
May 27th – European Objects and Lifelines of our Society – Chapter 6
June 10th – European Objects and Lifelines of our Society – Chapter 7
June 24th – European Objects and Lifelines of our Society – Chapter 8 and conclusion
July 8th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Introduction and Chapter 1
July 22nd – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 2
August 5th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 3
August 19th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 4
September 2nd – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 5
September 16th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 6
September 30th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 7
October 14th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 8
October 28th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 9
November 11th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 10
November 25th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 11
December 9th – The Dawn of Everything and The Invisible Weapon – Chapter 12
December 23rd – The Invisible Weapon – Chapters 13, 14, 15

books we still hope to read (someday):

• Dalrymple, William – The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company.
• Deudney, Daniel – Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity.
• Diogo, Maria Paula, and Dirk van Laak – Europeans Globalizing: Mapping, Exploiting, Exchanging.
• Knox, Hannah, and Penny Harvey – Roads: An Anthropology of Infrastructure and Expertise.
• Long, Pamela O. – Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and the Culture of Knowledge in Late Sixteenth-Century Rome.
• Swenson, Edward – Infrastructures of Religion and Power: Archaeologies of Landscape, Ritual, and Semiotics.
• Fickers, Andreas, and Pascal Griset – Communicating Europe: Technologies, Information, Events.
• Högselius, Per, and Erik van der Vleuten – Europe’s Infrastructure Transition: Economy, War, Nature.
• Kaiser, Wolfram, and J. W. Schot – Writing the Rules for Europe: Experts, Cartels, and International Organizations.
• Trischler, Helmuth, and Martin Kohlrausch – Building Europe on Expertise: Innovators, Organizers, Networkers.

previous books read in this reading group:

• The Apple II Age – Laine Nooney
• Telegraphic Imperialism – Deep Kanta Lahiri Choudhury
• The Smartness Mandate – Orit Halpern
• Technology of Empire – Daqing Yang
• News from Germany – Heidi J.S. Tworek
• balkan cyberia – viktor petrov
• how not to network a nation – benjamin peters
• technologies of speculation – sun-ha hong
• the closed world – paul edwards
• four internets – kieron o’hara & wendy hall
• what is wrong with rights – radha d’souza
• digital design and topological control – parisi
• golden age of analog – galloway
• countering the cloud – luke munn
• medium design – keller easterling
• reluctant power – rita zajác
• between truth and power – julie cohen
• the question concerning technology in china – yuk hui

/* We use CEST between the last Sunday of March until the last Sunday of October, then we switch back to CET

bi- weekly wednesday session 16:00 – 17:00 cet (once every two weeks)
facilitated by fieke@criticalinfralab.net

meet up here: https://uva-live.zoom.us/j/5689070082 | sign up for the mailinglist here and add you reading suggestions here.

previous books and articles read in this reading group:
– pollution is colonialism by Max Liboiron
– myth of green capitalism by Katharina Pistor
– from moore’s law to the carbon law by Daniel Pargman, Aksel Biørn-Hansen, Elina Eriksson, Jarmo Laaksolaht, Markus Robèrt
– solarities; seeking energy justice by After Oil Collective
– the value of a whale by Adrienne Buller
– after geoengineering: climate tragedy, repair, and restoration by Holly Jean Buck
– against crisis epistemology by kyle whyte
– discard studies: wasting, systems, and power by Max Liboiron and Josh Lepawsky 
– An alternative planetary future? Digital sovereignty frameworks and the decolonial option by Sebastián Lehuedé
– ‘Socialism is not just Built for a Hundred Years’: Renewable Energy and Planetary Thought in the Early Soviet Union (1917–1945) by Daniela Russ
– Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador by Thea Riofrancos
– The Security–Sustainability Nexus: Lithium Onshoring in the Global North by Thea Riofrancos
– The Internet Shutdown and Revolutionary Politics: Defining the Infrastructural Power of the Internet by Michael Truscello
– The world wide web of carbon: Toward a relational footprinting of information and communications technology’s climate impacts by Anne Pasek, Hunter Vaughan, and Nicole Starosielski.
– Shifting from ‘sustainability’ to regeneration by Bill Reed
– A Digital Tech Deal: Digital Socialism, Decolonization, and Reparations for a Sustainable Global Economy by Michael Kwet
– We Need To Rewild The Internet by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon
– Beyond Wiindigo Infrastructure by Winona LaDuke and Deborah Cowen
– How ‘Green’ Computing is Opening Up a New Frontier in Arctic Norway by Janna Frenzel
– A resourcification manifesto: Understanding the social process of resources becoming resources
– What might degrowth computing look like? + Strategies for Degrowth Computing
Water justice and technology. The Covid-19 crisis, computational resource control, and water relief policy
– Draft paper on IETF; framing environmental concerns and sustainability solutions by Fieke Jansen + Solar Protocol: Exploring Energy-Centered Design
– Draft dissertation chapter about the ITU and IETF work on environment-related standards by Kimberly Anastacio

SDIA in collaboration with the critical infrastructure lab is organizing an event on June 20th for the next chapter in our journey toward shaping thriving Dutch digital ecosystems — region by region.

Following our last event on operationalizing values in the Dutch digital infrastructure, we now turn our attention to building thriving digital ecosystems, ecosystems that are sustainable, transparent, and create positive local impact.

This event brings together regional policymakers, leaders, and innovators to showcase progress and concrete actions already underway, and to collaborate on next steps for digital ecosystems that benefit communities, businesses, and the environment.

Don’t miss this unique opportunity to join policymakers, IT infrastructure providers, and sustainability-focused customers in shaping the future of digital infrastructure in the Netherlands. Whether you’re a policy maker looking to stimulate regional development, a service provider aiming to gain competitive
advantage through sustainability, or a customer wanting to influence the market with your purchasing power – this event is for you.

June 20th 13:45 – 17:00
Sign-up here: https://www.sdia.io/events/thriving-digital-ecosystems-amsterdam

We are at a critical threshold in our computational futures. Investment in artificial intelligence (AI) is booming, and its application across society is accelerating at an unprecedented scale. Meanwhile, we are crossing the boundaries of several life-supporting planetary systems. Devastating heat waves, storms, fires and floods remind us of how human activity impacts all life on this planet.

In this reality, a blossoming community is challenging the tech solutionist approaches from our political and industry leaders and advocates for actual change to ensure that our technologies stay within planetary boundaries. The Green Screen coalition is announcing a series of brown bag sessions to spotlight this work. We hope these sessions provide opportunities to discuss key topics on the nexus of environment and tech with experts, draw inspiration from their work, learn in the open and build pathways to sustainable futures.

Keep an eye on this page for new brown bag session

Upcoming brown bag sessions:

Extraction in the majority world: AI infrastructure and the raw materials that power it

July 7, 4 – 5 PM CET

On Zoom – Register now

In this session, Paz Peña will present on the work done together with the Decolonial Feminist Coalition of Latin American activists on Digital and Environmental Justice, with a particular focus on the environmental impact of data centers in the Latin American context, and Ahmed Isamaldin will discuss the organizing work he does with the Center for Environmental and Social Studies (CESS) on mining in Sudan.

About the speakers

Paz Peña is an independent senior consultant specializing in technology, gender, and social justice. She is a 2025 Mozilla Senior Fellow, currently researching the environmental impacts of artificial intelligence data centers in Latin America. In 2021, she founded the Latin American Institute of Terraforming to explore the connection between technology and the ecological crisis from a feminist perspective. Paz is the author of “Tecnologías para un planeta en llamas” (Paidós, 2023), an introductory book that examines the role of techno-capitalism in the climate and ecological crisis. She is also a journalist and holds degrees in social communication and gender studies. Paz is based in Santiago, Chile.

Ahmed Isamaldin is a multi-disciplinary artist and researcher from Khartoum, Sudan. He holds a degree in physics from the University of Khartoum and has studied graphic design, photography in Cairo, and visual communication at Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin. His work centers on themes of immigration, psychology, revolutionary processes, decolonial design, and technology. He is currently leading the communication team at the Center for Environmental and Social Studies (CESS) in Sudan.

We invite proposals for papers offering critical perspectives on AI and the environment, AI and society, and the political economy of AI. We welcome proposals from all disciplines.

The symposium is part of the BRAID project Sustainable AI Futures, which is mobilising interdisciplinary perspectives on AI and the environment, including the social life of AI environmental governance tools. The symposium will take place on 18th September 2025 at Goldsmiths, University of London. Please submit a 300-word abstract via this form by Friday 11th July 2025. We aim to send notifications of acceptance by Friday 25th July 2025.

The rapid expansion of AI and computational infrastructure raises critical questions on whether we are governing AI responsibly, and if that is even possible at all. Contemporary governance regimes reduce social and environmental impacts to mere issues of quantification of harms and management of resources. Even if we track down an elusive number for its carbon emissions or water usage, how can we reconcile that with AI’s complex, messy and highly uncertain social impacts? What are AI’s sociopolitical effects, and how do we begin to notice, imagine, manage, or measure these effects? 

This symposium aims to consolidate researchers approaching questions of AI’s implications for sustainability, public interest technology, and economic justice across multiple disciplines. While there is a proliferation of research and public discourse around the central role that AI is playing in governance and infrastructure across multiple political contexts, the siloed approaches that exist across these disciplines have not been able to account for the complex global dimensions of AI politics and contestation across its value chain. This event invites researchers approaching these questions from different angles to propose ways in which we can come together to assess AI’s impacts in more systematic and comprehensive ways.

As a response to the current wave of AI development and deployment, concepts like responsible AI, sustainable AI, and AI governance have proliferated to manage these impacts at the point of design and consumption. We invite exploration of the nuances of these different approaches, as well as different national and regional contexts. However, despite the best intentions, these practices often end up reinforcing the very logics that they seek to question due to a lack of comprehensive assessment of global AI supply chains. As AI becomes more embedded in collective economic futures, how deeply are its core logics entangled with structural shifts – from green capitalism and the twin transition, to austerity, war, and accelerationism?

If alternative visions of AI are possible, what do they look like and what questions do they raise? What could AI look like if designed and operationalised outside dominant commercial and geopolitical frameworks? What possibilities emerge when we centre justice, sustainability, democracy, and decoloniality in AI development? How might the answers be different in different places around the world?

If AI should be resisted rather than governed, then where, how, by whom, with what resources and strategies? What precedents and projects of organising a resistance to AI exist, and what can we expect from the future? Where are the leverage points? If we reject the idea that AI is inevitable, what are the alternatives, and what new ethical, political, and epistemological questions do such alternatives raise?  

We invite scholars who centre issues of power, equity, (in)justice, governance and resistance in AI infrastructures in their research to submit a 300-word abstract for this symposium. If accepted, you will be expected to give a 20-minute presentation.

We expect to invite some of those who present to contribute articles to a special issue or an edited collection. 

Please submit your proposals via this form, and direct any queries to d.mcquillan@gold.ac.uk.
If you’d like to be kept informed about future opportunities events from the Sustainable AI Futures project, you can sign up here.

The symposium will be in-person; depending on interest, we will accommodate online presentations or an online pre- or post-event.