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How will we stay connected amidst a climate crisis? Conditions associated with climate change, such as sea level rise and increasing extreme weather events, can destabilize already vulnerable network and digital infrastructures. While existing infrastructures are in dire need of maintenance, additional infrastructures are simultaneously being built to address imbalances in network access and distribution. My dissertation project attends to these intersecting precarities as a way to reconsider how digital infrastructures can be reworked to address overlapping questions of environmental and digital inequities. My research is situated within marginalized coastal communities in south Louisiana, where legacies of petrochemical extraction has led to deep socioeconomic and ecological disparities, while increased intensity of storms and floods have begun to impede and damage an already sparse network infrastructure. In my project, I use archival, ethnographic, and design research methods to examine longer histories of environmental degradation, investigate current practices of maintaining and developing network infrastructures, and develop approaches for researchers in HCI and related computing fields to re-envision just and equitable network infrastructures.
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Under pressure: Keeping cables dry in south Louisiana
Climate change is impacting the maintenance and repair of last-mile internet connections. In this case study, I describe how telecommunication workers based in south Louisiana maintain ageing digital infrastructures that require cable pressurization, a method used to keep buried wires dry. This work is becoming more difficult due to stronger and more frequent hurricanes, an effect of climate change that is tied to this region’s history with extractive industries. Additionally, this maintenance work can come at the cost of being able to update these ageing infrastructures. I argue that maintaining infrastructures in this context is to keep artefacts functioning within an unstable landscape. Ensuring that internet services continue against the backdrop of climate change requires shifts in considering how networks are embedded in specific geographies in relational and material ways.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2147052
- PAR ID:
- 10528168
- Publisher / Repository:
- Intellect Books
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Environmental Media
- Volume:
- 4
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2632-2463
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 91 to 94
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1386/jem_00098_1
