Media, Infrastructure, Environment

Media entanglements make the lived environments we share. By exploring the connections between imperialism, colonialism, Black and Indigenous resistance, and knowledge practices, we investigate how social, cultural, political and economic processes are inevitably caught up with media technologies and ecologies. We explore how their infrastructures – including knowledge infrastructures – constitute and permeate, orient and disorient, reproduce and undermine different modes of co-existence and communication. Concerned with media’s embeddedness in environmental contexts, the projects in this research stream rethink environments as media and as processes that mediate and facilitate the production of accidental, and very non-accidental, toxic territories of injustice – from slums to exclusion zones.

Working Groups

Pollution: Elemental Media / Weapon of War

Led by Svitlana Matviyenko with Rahul Mukherjee
Nov 2022 –

This working group will bring together the notions of elemental media with the topic of pollution and war pollution, in particular. How does thinking media elementally help us understand pollution as a weapon of war?

Vernadsky Working Group

An international group to study the works on Biosphere and Noosphere by Soviet geologist and geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky (in Ukrainian and Russian).

Fall 2021 – Fall 2022 readings and schedule

Completed Projects

Media and Environment: Biosphere, Risk, Elemental Media

An international group of associated researchers that explores a movement away from “mass media” to media as milieu, media as relations and processes.

Fall 2021

People Involved

At SFU

a Professor of Communication researching cyberwar, political economy of information and critical infrastructure studies.

Around the World