Working group conveners: Associate Professor Minna Vigren, LUT University; Professor Tarja Rautiainen-Keskustalo, Tampere University; Doctoral Researcher Antti Kurko, Tampere University

The environmental impacts of media technologies and digital infrastructure have increasingly attracted interest within media studies. They form a central part of the newer, materially oriented media ecology (e.g., Cubitt, 2017; Fuller, 2005; Gabrys, 2011; Parikka, 2015; Taffel, 2019; 2023). The media ecological approach takes as its starting point the planetary interconnectedness and critically scrutinises the discourse of sustainability, whose technosolutionist orientation tends to overlook that digitalisation and new technologies, such as artificial intelligence, can offer solutions only if their own sustainability problems are addressed (see e.g., Crawford, 2021).

In this working group, media and (digital) technology are approached critically by examining their relationship to the ecological crisis. Questions of sustainability within media studies are often situated at disciplinary intersections and draw on influences from, for example, posthumanism and science and technology studies. The environmental responsibility of media technology has been called for due to issues related to mineral extraction for digital devices, the energy and water consumption of data centres, and problems concerning the repairability of devices and e-waste (e.g., Baldé et al., 2024; Brown et al., 2022; Crawford, 2021; 2024; Eerola et al., 2021; Gabrys, 2011; Taffel, 2023). It is a question of the ethics of media and media technologies: What would ecologically sustainable media technology look like? What would media studies look like if it combined its disciplinary roots with questions of ecological sustainability?

The working group challenges research approaches that centre primarily on problems and matters of concern (Latour 2004). As feminist scholar of care Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) argues, limiting oneself to identifying problems tends to remain general and impersonal, and is therefore insufficient for addressing issues of sustainability. Her provocative feminist alternative is to focus on matters of care and the ethico–political speculation about the “as well as possible”.

We invite contributions that examine what kind of site of inquiry the interdisciplinary field combining media studies and sustainability questions is, and how it can open up new perspectives on media studies’ traditions, theories, methods, concepts, and objects of study. Particularly, we welcome presentations that reflect how media studies could be shaped by an ethical commitment to the planet’s fragility and the preservation of ecosystems in relation to media-technological infrastructures, practices, and the values sustaining them. Contributions may come from any stage of research, from early ideas to results, and may be theoretical, methodological, empirical, or provocative openings. Presentations can be in Finnish or English.