"One must praxis with oil to understand oil. One must praxis with words to find new ways of circulating meaning. I call this ‘Heliotechnics/Heliotechniques’." Read this piece by Elia Vargas (and others!) in Issue 6.1 of the Journal of Environmental Media: intellectdiscover.com/content/jour...

My commentary 'AI is Trash' is now out with the Journal of Environmental Media! doi.org/10.1386/jem_... It's an attempt to be constructively pessimistic about the state of genAI, its political economy, and its environmental impacts. I curse! I grump!

Even when asked specifically only about environmental harm, the output ends with a reorientation away from that topic ("But there are a lot of efforts to stop this!") and a suggestion for the user to investigate those proposed solutions.

Prompt: What are the environmental dangers of generative AI?

Prompt: What is the long term climate impact on AI?

Is anyone researching the way that ChatGPT ends its responses with a recommendation of what to ask it next? Are there systematic studies of this? Because, anecdotally, it seems to function very similarly to search and content recommendation systems that direct the user's inquiry in particular ways.

Fleck Prize winner for 2025! Lisa Yin Han’s Deepwater Alchemy: Extractive Mediation and the Taming of the Sea Floor 4sonline.org/2025_lisa_yi...

Everyday ecofascism is next on my list!

Deepwater Alchemy is officially on audiobook! Narrated by the incredible @cindykay.bsky.social who brought this book to life in a way I could never have imagined. Thank you @tantoraudio.bsky.social for adapting this! @uminnpress.bsky.social

I got a chance to be back in conversation with Jonathan Bate for his Blue Humanities podcast! Episode is now live here: open.spotify.com/episode/7D4T... @uminnpress.bsky.social

🎧 "Infrastructure is invisible until it breaks." A thoughtful conversation between Lisa Yin Han ( @thehanopticon.bsky.social ) and Gloria Chan-Sook Kim, thinking elementally on microbes, ocean, catastrophic deferral, scalar mediation, resolution, the plume, + more. share.transistor.fm/s/f3b95b9a

This is true in Indiana, too. I cannot afford ONE academic database for my LMC with my entire annual budget, let alone the dozens provided by the state library.

Today on the Edge Effects Podcast, we warmly welcome environmental humanities authors Sarah Dimick, Lisa Han, and Ben Stanley for a first-of-its-kind special episode about their newly published books. We hope you enjoy!📚 edgeeffects.net/sarah-dimick...

Listening to @melhogan.bsky.social’s Data Fix podcast and bouncing in my seat listening to @thehanopticon.bsky.social talking about the sea floor. This is the specific book I need!! (Ordered it before I even finished listening.)

Best part of my week was playing Citizen Sleeper 2. What an amazing game and story! 5 stars highly recommend

Cant wait to talk oceans and extraction at McGill today for the Art History and Communication Studies series! Come see me this afternoon: www.mcgill.ca/ahcs/events/...

Are you an #envhum scholar looking to make a difference for the field? Become a co-editor of the journal Environmental Humanities! We need a new set of 2 co-editors to replace Franklin & I from Jan 2026. See the call here: environmentalhumanities.org Contact us if you have any questions.

The call for this year’s digital methods summer school is out! I did this during grad school and found it so helpful to explore and think deeply about methodologies for examining digital power. Highly recommend! The focus is on social media and AI this year www.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/SummerSc...

Tomorrow at UCLA! Elizabeth Deloughrey and I will be having a conversation about our favorite topic: the blue humanities!

Probably time to share my film/media history starter pack again. A treasure trove of great folks in here! (Part II linked below...always adding more) go.bsky.app/12Wo3y5 #history #mediahistory #filmhistory #histbookchat #booksky

Around 35% of SpaceX’s revenue comes directly from the federal govt. Less than 1% of NPR’s budget comes from the federal govt.

The state of publishing dominating the academic ecosystem journals.librarypublishing.arizona.edu/jpe/article/...

Oh my god is it really not Friday or February yet

A delightful sight! Can’t wait to dig in

Media and STS friends! There's just 3 days left to submit your paper abstracts to our #4S2025 Open panel, Reverberation and/as Mediation. Submit by Feb 2 here: www.4sonline.org/accepted_ope... Feel free to contact me or @mojojojosef.bsky.social for questions!

Happy Spring festival / Chinese new year! Gong xi fa cai! It's the year of the snake, a time to be intuitive, creative, and wise! And of course, cunning with our resistance and disobedience 🐍 🧧 To celebrate, I'm sharing my family's actual authentic dumpling recipe. You're welcome, Bluesky! 😜

In case you ever wondered what this whole Doomsday Clock thing is about youtu.be/Q5WtaWdXIT0?...

how, specifically, does freezing research dollars hurt your state's economy? link for deets by state. keep in mind this is separate from all the other programs that support public schools, provide food for kids, supplies for hospitals, equipment for infrastructure. www.faseb.org/science-poli...

The new issue of the Journal of Environmental Media is out! There are some great articles about carbon tracking, news coverage of ecological crises, data centers, digital organizing for climate movements, and more! Check out issue 5.2 here: intellectdiscover.com/content/jour...

"Meta is building a 2GW+ data center that is so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan," 🫠🫠🫠https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/meta-plans-60-65bn-capex-on-ai-data-center-boom-will-bring-1gw-of-compute-online-this-year/

I started class today with an icebreaker for my students: what is a disaster that has shaped you? The responses were 😩. Hardly any repeats. Students talking about going without power, housing, almost dying, witnessing environmental injustice. Floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, fires. Just 3 said COVID

SHARE WIDELY. KNOW YOUR RIGHTS. With mass deportations starting today across the country, it is vitally important - for both citizens and non-citizens - to know your rights. You have the right to remain silent. Assert it. You have the right to a lawyer. Ask for one. (1/3)

Next up on my reading list, Slime, by Simon Estok (Cambridge UP, 2024)!

Please help me get our CFP to people working on maritime studies, from any field. Mainsheet: A Journal of Multidisciplinary Maritime Studies is published by Mystic Seaport Museum, and I'm the managing editor. Open access, no publishing fee. #MaritimeHistory #MaritimeStudies #CoastalHistory

Master doc of mutual aid groups helping people and animals on the ground in LA. Please share docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

A key takeaway: in order to confront the growing housing safety & affordability crisis, we need to understand our fates as shared, and reimagine a home insurance system that reduces risk and provides equitable & fair protection. climateandcommunity.org/research/sha... #SharedFates 9/9

These teenagers and young men — 95% of whom are Black, Latinx, or Filipino — earn between $2.20 and $4 per hour, plus an additional $1 an hour when they’re actively fighting fires, according to the DJJ. ⤵️

LA fires are a good reminder that the only difference between me and any refugee is luck.

Might as well just turn this course into an ARG at this point

A queer black woman AI created by 10 white men, a white woman, and an Asian male. The inevitable next step in blackfishing

Meta literally created a LGBTQ exception for calling someone mentally ill as an insult. You can't do it for any other group except LGBTQ people.

LA firefighters were defunded by $23 million this year while the LAPD was granted an additional $138 million. If it weren’t for mutual aid efforts like MALAN I’d be lost in my outrage on days like today. Stay safe, LA. docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

So much money and water for AI and none for the burning homes, for the newly homeless baking in a heating world. There is no redemption for AI from an environmental standpoint. I will and always will be an AI hater.

special issue on SOLIDARITY "we solicit work that explores understandings and practices of solidarity among individuals, groups, and/or academic disciplines—particularly when solidarity requires working across various lines of difference." www.midwest-mla.org/current-call...

This book is great, and I appreciate the recommendations for more intentional means of discovering + supporting new music — i.e.; hosting and going to shows. College and independent radio (and non-profit criticism) are great for this, too!… [1/2]

OnlineFirst - "The White Amur and the WasteShark: Hungry machines and circumventive remediations of waste" by @thehanopticon.bsky.social: #bluehumanities #STS #AI journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Two great new books I’ve been reading over break! Sharing Spaces edited by @finnarne.me and @dollyjorgensen.bsky.social, and California Against the Sea by @rosannaxia.bsky.social

Just got a new article published in EPE: Nature and Space today! "The White Amur and the Wasteshark: Hungry Machines and Circumventive Remediations of Waste." Check it out here: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

SLSA 2025 website is live! slsa2025.org

I haven't gone through the whole list of open panels, but while I am at it, let me highlight a couple of cool ones: 1. This one on "Reverberation as/and Mediation" convened by @thehanopticon.bsky.social and @mojojojosef.bsky.social !