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- Convenors:
-
Hanna Göbel
(HafenCity Universität Hamburg)
Ruzana Liburkina (University of Hamburg)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
This panel addresses the relations between projects and practices of digitalization on the one hand and the enactment of toxic worlds on the other. As the former transform landscapes and environments, they also enhance and foster pathways for inequally distributed pollution and contamination.
Description
This panel addresses the affective relations, bodily entanglements, infrastructural links, and systemic interdependencies between projects and practices of digitalization on the one hand and the enactment of toxic worlds on the other. As the former transform landscapes and environments, they also enhance existing and foster new pathways for inequally distributed pollution and contamination. At the same time, digital technologies play a crucial role for mitigation strategies and foster hope for sustainable industrial and cultural solutions for resilient futures. In lieu of elaborating on how digitalization renders our worlds either more or less toxic, we aim at grasping and discussing the intricacies and ambivalences of this relation.
Lithium batteries, arsenic-doped semiconductors, toxic e-waste - digitalization depends on toxic raw materials and generates hazardous residues. The resulting harm and risks are unevenly distributed and shape landscapes to an unprecedented extent. From infrastructural violence through logistical pollution to new forms of colonial sacrifice zones around data centers, “toxic bets and digital wasting practices” (Bridges 2025) have extended our understanding of how environments become toxic. Meanwhile, AI is increasingly discussed as crucial for a sustainable transformation of the material sciences (Peplow 2025) and computing is attributed a key role for a shift towards „just sustainability design“ (Becker 2023; Boeva & Noel 2025). Both the toxic downsides of digitalization and its mitigation promises materialise in shifting ecosystems, infrastructures, and built environments.
This open panel invites scholars to explore these processes and constellations through empirical case studies and conceptual ideas. Based on these insights, we propose to discuss how the focus on digitalization and toxicity affects the notion of relational environments and environing technologies in STS and beyond, and in regard of this conference's topic "more than now".