Low-Carbon Conversations
These 90-minute gatherings offer a monthly virtual conversation space for carbon-concerned folks to come together to share carbon-lowering skills, strategies and conundrums. Bring your questions, your curiosity, and your workarounds. Join researchers, librarians, artists and activists as we find our way toward a lower-carbon future.
Each session will contain a 'making & doing' section, where people share skills. The February gathering will focus on ways to communicate with our institutions, organizations, and departments. Ahead of the meeting, you'll be invited to share any text samples of emails or other communicative modes that might be helpful in encouraging low-carbon shifts within our work spaces and beyond.
Low-Carbon Research Methods Office Hours
The LCRM “Office Hour” is designed to support people at any stage in their career, including faculty, students, and staff in university settings, as well as artists, activists, and researchers in both private and not-for-profit sectors. This 1-hour session is geared towards the development of low-carbon approaches that advance environmental and social justice. Office Hours are facilitated by LCRMG member Kate Elliott, who will prompt you to reflect on the processes that shape how you make and share work.
DIY Methods 2023
A conference-by-mail/zine-ring exploring experimental research methods. Pitches due April 15 2023. Zines mailed out in September 2023.
Explore a Low Carbon Internet Workshop
In this free workshop, organized by Dawn Walker, participants will be introduced to concepts and tools used to discuss different forms of low carbon networking (including "net zero" data centres, and website "carbon footprints"). Through website walks, explorations in the browser with developer tools or hosted alternatives, and network analysis, people will explore the carbon impact of digital communications from their desk/lap/top.
After these explorations we will turn to the questions of what is actually being measured, and how, relating these attempts at quantification to projects aiming to reduce internet and web CO2 emissions or offer alternate framings of networking and computing in contrast to the paradigm of energy efficiency.
Thursday April 27 @ 9 - 11 PT / 12 - 14 ET / 16 - 18 UTC
Online, distributed. Link to be shared.
Energy(and)Humanities: Low-Carbon Research Methods Workshop
This workshop is organized by Kate Elliott, Alexandra Lakind, and Inna Häkkinen as a part of The Environmental Humanities Month at the University of Helsinki. It invites all those who want to explore the prospects for more climate-friendly research methods, and discuss the practical barriers and challenges of implementing a low-carbon approach in research towards advancing environmental and social justice. Participants will be invited to discuss low-carbon ways of data storage, low energy and low-data design choices of data visualization as well as a zine-based format of presenting the research outlines. The presenters will encourage the participants to think more about the ways how their practices intersect with carbon-intensive expectations and norms, and to consider alternatives within academia and beyond.
Academic Activism and Low-Carbon Research Workshop
How are research methods impacted by climate change? To what extent do they contribute to it? How can we free research from the financing of fossil fuels industries and, more broadly, from acarbon-based relationship to knowledge? These are some of the key questions that the scholars involved in this international workshop will address. This workshop is organized by the Low-Carbon Methods Research Group, a loosely affiliated network of scholars interested in investigating the impact of climate change on academic researchmethods, as well as the equity and epistemological gains that might be found in an energy transition for the research sector.
Speakers: Anne Pasek, Antoine Hardy, Hannah Knox, Olivier Berné, Tamara Ben Ari, Ilana Cohen, Alexandra Lakind, Kate Elliott, Aadita Chaudhury, Tim Schütz, Megan Raby
Friday 30, September 2022, online.
9 am Washington, 2pm London, 3pm Paris, 6.30 pm Delhi
To register, please send an e-mail to : antoine.hardy@scpobx.fr
DIY Methods 2022
A zine-based conference-by-mail highlighting experimental methods through experimental means. Discussion on September 9th 2022 via Twitter (#DIYMethods).
2022 Low-Carbon Research Methods Summer Institute
During July & August anyone can sign up for an “Office Hour” to think more about the ways their practices intersect with carbon-intensive expectations and norms, and to consider alternatives. This 1-hour session will be geared towards a low-carbon approach that advances environmental and social justice. Office Hour participants will be invited to enroll in the Summer Institute Certificate program, which will entail attending a speculative workshop in August and reflecting on low-carbon tools and techniques. The Summer Institute will be directed by Alexandra Lakind & Kate Elliott.
Low-Carbon Research Methods Showcase - February 11 & 25 2022
Presentation of collaboratively written methods position papers and a wider deliberation on key theses of low-carbon research methods.
Digital Conviviality Workshop - February 7 2022
Run by Shirley Roburn and Katie Giddings
A workshop drawing from the tools and directions of authentic relating. Can the fun and feelings of real connection that we get from in-person conferences be possible online? Because decarbonizing academic conferences plays an important role in decolonizing academic exchange, making informal virtual event spaces convivial is an increasingly vital skill for academic event organizers. This workshop takes participants through a series of activities, easy to learn and facilitate in virtual settings, that are designed to create genuine connection between people and encourage attendees to be fully present in the moment. We will discuss the theory that informs these activities, and share resources to encourage participants to adapt them to their own contexts. We aim to encourage a greater sense of community among scholars with a shared interest in reducing their carbon footprint.
Low Carbon Methods & Media Lecture Series - November 12, 2021
‘What about the coffee break?’: Designing a low-carbon online conference for conviviality, November 12 2021, by Michelle Bastian.
This talk uses The Material Life of Time conference as a case study for discussing how we can support conviviality within online events. How successful were we at addressing ‘the coffee break problem’ which has continued to haunt our collective perception of online events? I will suggest that paying at least as much attention to hosting and community-building, as to programme design and delivery, is vital for embedding online conferences as activities that people want to go to. At the same time, I raise concerns about the rapidly entrenched norm that online conferences are not seen as ‘events’ that we can prioritise in our schedules and block off from other commitments. Instead, both on a personal level and an institutional level there are barriers to full engagement, which need to be addressed if we are to make the aspects we say we miss -- like informal networking and full attendance -- a better supported possibility.
Low Carbon Methods & Media Lecture Series - April 14, 2021
An Autoethnography of Academic Carbon,
April 14th 2021, by Hannah Knox.
This talk was part of the 2021 Low Carbon Methods & Media Lecture Series. Through short and conversational exchanges, the series explores the prospects for more climate-safe research methods and media practices in the arts, humanities, and social sciences as well as the practical barriers and social and aesthetic norms challenged thereby. Past lectures are archived here, in a significantly compressed form, to keep file sizes low enough to fit within the constraints of the Solar Protocol network and the local server at Trent University. Many thanks to the folks at Small File Media Festival for the technical suggestions to this end.
Low Carbon Methods & Media Lecture Series - April 7, 2021
Minimal Cloud: A Postcolonial (Low Carbon) Approach to Environmental Data Infrastructure and Computing,
April 7th 2021, by Cindy Lin.
This talk was part of the 2021 Low Carbon Methods & Media Lecture Series. Through short and conversational exchanges, the series explores the prospects for more climate-safe research methods and media practices in the arts, humanities, and social sciences as well as the practical barriers and social and aesthetic norms challenged thereby. Past lectures are archived here, in a significantly compressed form, to keep file sizes low enough to fit within the constraints of the Solar Protocol network and the local server at Trent University. Many thanks to the folks at Small File Media Festival for the technical suggestions to this end.
Low Carbon Methods & Media Lecture Series - March 9, 2021
Tackling the Carbon Footprint of Streaming Media: The Small File Media Festival,
March 9 2021, by Radek Przedpełski and Laura U. Marks.
This talk was part of the 2021 Low Carbon Methods & Media Lecture Series. Through short and conversational exchanges, the series explores the prospects for more climate-safe research methods and media practices in the arts, humanities, and social sciences as well as the practical barriers and social and aesthetic norms challenged thereby. Past lectures are archived here, in a significantly compressed form, to keep file sizes low enough to fit within the constraints of the Solar Protocol network and the local server at Trent University. Many thanks to the folks at Small File Media Festival for the technical suggestions to this end.
Low Carbon Methods & Media Lecture Series - February 9th, 2021
Tackling the Carbon Footprint of Streaming Media: Research in IT Engineering,
February 9th 2021, by Laura U. Marks with Stephan Makonin, Alejandro Rodriguez-Silva, and Radek Przedpełski.
This talk was part of the 2021 Low Carbon Methods & Media Lecture Series. Through short and conversational exchanges, the series explores the prospects for more climate-safe research methods and media practices in the arts, humanities, and social sciences as well as the practical barriers and social and aesthetic norms challenged thereby. Past lectures are archived here, in a significantly compressed form, to keep file sizes low enough to fit within the constraints of the Solar Protocol network and the local server at Trent University. Many thanks to the folks at Small File Media Festival for the technical suggestions to this end.
Low Carbon Methods & Media Lecture Series - January 18th, 2021
Liftoff Holocene – Touchdown Anthropocene: Academics Reflect on Carbon-Intensive Scholarship in the Early 21st Century,
January 18th 2021, by Johan Gärdebo.
This talk was part of the 2021 Low Carbon Methods & Media Lecture Series. Through short and conversational exchanges, the series explores the prospects for more climate-safe research methods and media practices in the arts, humanities, and social sciences as well as the practical barriers and social and aesthetic norms challenged thereby. Past lectures are archived here, in a significantly compressed form, to keep file sizes low enough to fit within the constraints of the Solar Protocol network and the local server at Trent University. Many thanks to the folks at Small File Media Festival for the technical suggestions to this end.