Climate Futures in Digital Cultures

So far, the nexus between climate breakdown and border and migration management has mostly been discussed in relation to climate-induced migration and how to regulate it. This research area invites proposals for PhD-projects that engage with the manifold interconnections between climate change and digital migration and its regulation beyond this narrow focus. It particularly welcomes proposals that engage with the following as well as related themes and questions:

• The ecological footprint of border controls, both in terms of physical trash and debris generated by border infrastructures as well as emissions caused by energy-intensive digital modes of border control, such as by ‘smart border’ programs or ‘seamless travel’ schemes based on digital travel credentials.
• The role of digital technologies in(self-)organizing as well as governing and ‘managing’ climate refugees and climate-induced migration.
• The production of data and numerical facts about climate migration through forecasts and estimates and how related imagined futures of climate-induced migration reconfigure border and migration regimes in the present.
• Critical engagements with far-right discourses and mobilizations around ‘ecobordering’ (Turner and Bailey 2025) which blame immigration for national environmental degradation in order to call for further border restrictions while fostering racist anti-migrant narratrives.
• Digital and traditional modes of bordering implicated by attempts of the upper-class to protect themselves (and their wealth) from the effects of the looming climate catastrophe, for example by buying property and building bunkers in areas deemed safe.

This research area assumes that the histories and epistemologies of computing and the concepts of “nature,” “ecology,” or “sustainability” over the course of the 20th century are intrinsically intertwined. PhD projects within this theme could focus on the ways in which the computer as technology and metaphor was influenced by biological and ecological styles of thinking (e.g. biological computing, green computing, perma-computing), or on historical perspectives and debates on the environmental impact on computers.

Cities have become key sites as well as testbeds for imagining climate futures, with smart technologies deployed to create resilient, green cities. Critical scholarship in science and technology and urban studies has demonstrated how these technologies and their accompanying knowledges and practices have been shaped by particular notions of smartness, sustainability and progress, to the detriment of more plural visions of climate futures. Projects within this theme could explore the infrastructural practices, from resource-efficient construction to urban twinning, which seek to establish social and technical capacities for preempting or mitigating climate effects. 

Digital media, including video games, vertical videos, AI generated films, and other forms of contemporary moving images, reflect and shape specific forms of an environmental aesthetic under the conditions of climate change. Concurrently, digital streaming and gaming platforms significantly contribute to and exacerbate climate change. PhD projects in this field investigate concrete environmental aesthetics, formats, and communities in Digital Cultures that address and aim to resolve this paradoxical relationship (e.g. Green Gaming, Serious Games and Sustainability, Sustainability Influencer, Sustainable Film Production).

The measuring and control of environmental sound has been a part of imagining climate futures since the mid 20th century. Noise pollution is today considered to be the second largest environmental health risk in Europe by the WHO, informing plans for urban developing, e-mobility and research on its affects on wildlife. Discourses for example around the noise of data centres point to the materiality and situatedness of digital media and their environmental and energetic costs. PhD projects within this theme could explore the noise of digital media and energy production, the generation and analysis of acoustic sensor data, acoustic ecologies and sensory ecologies.

Climate discourses are intrinsically shaped by heterogeneous narratives. Literature — both historical and contemporary — not only engages with these narratives but also produces its own through specific aesthetic forms, which provide a distinctive mode of access to the historical and future dimensions of climate and its relation to digital cultures, for example in climate fiction. PhD projects to be developed could focus on investigating such forms of literary knowledge and their epistemological potential within climate discourse.

Climate futures are negotiated through everyday economic decisions, framed by sociotechnical discourses, practices and affects. While dominant organizational forms have enabled wasteful and unsustainable processes of technology production, circulation and consumption, this theme is dedicated to alternative and emergent forms of technology stewardship. Potential projects within this theme include (and can go beyond) ethnographic and/or comparative and case-study based investigations of hardware circulation, repair and reuse, as well as innovation cultures for more sustainable hardware design.

Melissa Gregg (University of Bristol)

In relation to the climate crisis, outer space has emerged as an object of speculation and imagination in which digital technologies such as satellite networks and space travel offer both means of managing planetary crises and ways of escaping from it. PhD projects within this research theme could explore these materialized imaginaries, for example space debris and ruins in space as processes that bridge past and future and can render visible how societal and political earthly “remains” are projected and materialized beyond planetary boundaries.