Thinking with Climate Change, Faculty Seminar 1, 15 March, 11 – 12pm

The Faculty of Arts and Education’s ‘Thinking with Climate Change’ is back for 2021!

Please come along to the first seminar in the series this year, presented by Laura Bedford, Monique Mann, Marcus Foth and Reece Walters:

A post-capitalocentric critique of digital technology and environmental harm: new directions at the intersection of digital and green criminology

Only recently have scholars of criminology begun to examine a wider spectrum of impacts of digital technologies beyond ‘cybercrime’, to include human rights, privacy, data extractivism, and surveillance. However, such accounts remain anthropocentric and capitalocentric. They do not fully consider the environmental impacts caused by the manufacture, consumption, use, and disposal of digital technologies under conditions of ecologically unequal exchange. The worst impacts of extractivism and pollution are borne by societies and ecosystems in the world’s economic periphery and contribute to an acceleration of planetary ecocide. Three examples illustrate our argument: (i) the mining of metals and minerals in the deep sea; (ii) the disposal of e-waste, and; (iii) the planned obsolescence of digital devices and limiting the right to repair. Acknowledging the potential positive contributions that technology can make to a more-than-human future, we advance research on the decoupling of technological progress and economic growth. 

Dr Laura Bedford is a Lecturer in Criminology and member of the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University. Her areas of interest include green criminology, state-corporate crime, political ecology, activism and resistance, and policing.

Dr Monique Mann is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology and member of the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University. Dr Mann is an Adjunct Researcher with the Law, Science, Technology and Society Research Centre at Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

Marcus Foth (PhD, FACS) is Professor of Urban Informatics in the QUT Design Lab at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. He is also an Honorary Professor in the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University, Denmark. His transdisciplinary research focusses on interaction design, smart cities, community engagement, media architecture, and sustainability. He is a Fellow of the Australian Computer Society, and a 2021-2023 member of the Australian Research Council College of Experts. He founded the Urban Informatics Research Lab in 2006 and the QUT Design Lab in 2016. He tweets @sunday9pm.

Reece Walters is Professor of Criminology at Deakin University. He is also a Visiting Professorial Fellow at the Open University the United Kingdom. His areas of research interest and expertise include green criminology, crimes of the powerful, and the sociology of criminological knowledge. He is particularly interested in the ways in which corporations and governments exploit and compromise the ‘essentials of life’, namely air, food and water for power and profit.

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