A Pasek
Biographic Data
| ID | 46102 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Pasek |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Pasek |
| SIGNATURE | PASEK A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Trent University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8770-418X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 19 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Sustainable AI Research?
High-performance computing research, particularly concerning so-called artificial intelligence, is increasingly scrutinised for its environmental impacts. Many researchers are actively debating how to respond. Surveying recent English language research community publications, this paper identifies three distinct but overlapping proposed approaches to greening compute-heavy machine learning research: 1) efficiency, 2) the net benefit of downstream…
AI is trash
This commentary discusses the rise of generative machine learning tools (so-called artificial intelligence [AI]) and their joint informational and environmental harms. It takes the argumentative stance that most AI today can be usefully described as a kind of trash, both in terms of the quality of its outputs and its proliferating social and ecological costs. Extending the analogy further, it explores how the AI trash problem is best approached l…
Zines for Research Exchange
In this piece Anne Pasek and Aksel Biørn-Hansen interview each other on their respective experiments in zine-based experimental research exchange: DIY Methods, an annual conference-by-postal-mail, and Liminal Excavations, a zine-based intervention at ICT4S (Information and Communication Studies for Sustainability) 2024. They reflect on practical lessons they’ve learned in facilitating alternative publishing for academic research as well as some o…
Beyond redistribution
Prevailing just transition proposals often assume the continuity of colonial land relations and see ‘greener’ industrial development as a pathway to prosperity for all. Our paper aligns with and aims to contribute to emerging scholarship that questions these assumptions. Through a review of interdisciplinary just transition research, we map a distinction between mainstream, critical and reparative approaches to just transitions. Mainstream perspe…
De l’échange académique à faible impact carbone
Energy for the War Room
Background: This article examines the “energy war room,” a 2019 United Conservative Party campaign promise to build a new rapid response communications body to defend the Albertan oil and gas industry from critics online. Analysis: The authors explore the history of the war room concept and the long-running economic and social tensions in Canadian/Albertan staples state formations, analyzing how contradictory claims to weakness and strength struc…
Flying the skies to wire the seas
Since the commercial aviation boom in the 1960s and 70s, the subsea cable industry has relied on global air travel for network development, infrastructure maintenance, and market penetration. However, COVID-19 disruptions forced a shift to remote work, challenging traditional travel practices and presenting an opportunity for carbon emission reduction. This study investigates the industry’s response to the “new normal” and its implications for mo…
Spiral-scaling climate action
The notion that scholars should reduce consumption of workrelated flight travel as a form of climate action has become common in academia. Proponents of this idea have coalesced into a sectoral movement seeking to have a more significant impact. This article critically reflects on the case of the Academic Flying Less Movement (AFLM) to conceptually explore how the environmental concerns of individual scholars might cohere and coalesce into someth…
What is environmental media studies so far
In this editorial introduction, we revisit the question: ‘What is environmental media studies?’ This provocation, raised in an exceptional article by founding co-editors Meryl Shriver-Rice and Hunter Vaughan in the journal’s first issue, continues to influence how the journal moves forward. However, under the leadership of a new editorial team, we reflect on the new directions and ongoing challenges presented by the interdisciplinary field of env…
ICT environmentalism and the sustainability game
Over the past three decades, corporate branding has trended strongly towards environmental conscientiousness and green rhetoric, often heralded under the term “sustainability” – a broad and mutable rhetorical strategy that not only serves industry self-interest but is mobilized by civil society actors as well. This tension is especially apparent in the information communication technologies (ICT) sector. Employing Wittgenstein’s concept of the la…
The world wide web of carbon
The climate impacts of the information and communications technology sector-and Big Data especially-is a topic of growing public and industry concern, though attempts to quantify its carbon footprint have produced contradictory results. Some studies argue that information and communications technology's global carbon footprint is set to rise dramatically in the coming years, requiring urgent regulation and sectoral degrowth. Others argue that inf…
On Being Anxious About Digital Carbon Emissions
This essay examines how many scholars-including myself-are thinking and feeling about growing concerns about the climate impacts of digital networks. Whether in news headlines, civil society reports, or peer presentations, we increasingly encounter alarming figures that link streaming video and cloud storage practices with a potential carbon time bomb. These digital environmental actors may lack a clear account of the relative impacts of a given …
The Gospel of Climate Skepticism
Review of: The Gospel of Climate Skepticism: Why Evangelical Christians Oppose Action on Climate Change , Robin Globus Veldman (2019) Oakland: University of California Press, 332 pp., ISBN 978-0-52030-367-6, p/bk, $29.95
Carbon Vitalism
This article names and examines carbon vitalism, a strain of climate denial centered on the moral recuperation of carbon dioxide—and thus fossil fuels. Drawing on interconnections between CO2, plant life, and human breath, carbon vitalists argue that carbon dioxide is not pollution but the stuff of life itself and thus possesses ethical and ecological standing. This philosophy contains a poetics of denial that is too often overlooked by studies o…
Reflections on a hypothetical decentralized grassroots deployment solar geoengineering scenario
Low-Carbon Research
This essay examines how the fossil fuel energy regimes that support contemporary academic norms in turn shape and constrain knowledge production. High-carbon research methods and exchanges, particularly those that depend on aviation, produce distinct exclusions and incentives that could be reformed in the transition to a low-carbon academy. Drawing on feminist STS, alternative modes of collective research creation and collaboration are outlined, …
Fiber, Fingers, and Code
This article describes how software is imagined and used to disrupt garment industry practices. Drawing from interviews, fieldwork, and discourse analysis of marketing from two companies, Stoll and Resonance, we argue that software is integral to the creation of a new kind of designer, a “digital craftsman,” that directly interfaces with a new kind of supply chain. This interaction is defined by its “seamlessness”—what we describe as both an emer…
Mediating Climate, Mediating Scale
Climate communication is seemingly stuck in a double bind. The problem of global warming requires inherently trans-scalar modes of engagement, encompassing times and spaces that exceed local frames of experience and meaning. Climate media must therefore negotiate representational extremes that risk overwhelming their audience with the immensity of the problem or rendering it falsely manageable at a local scale. The task of visualizing climate is …
Data Segregation and Algorithmic Amplification
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Simon Fraser University’s Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media in the School of Communication. She has studied both systems design engineering and English literature, which she combines and mutates in her current work on digital media. She is author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (Chun, 2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT, 2011), Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual…
Introduction
It is time for feminist media studies to refocus its attention on the body. Bodies matter in the ways in which they are differentiated, globally positioned, valued, shared, disrupted, erased, mis-r
The Pencil of Error
There is a strange inheritance between analog photography and digital images in regards to the confused agencies of their making. Both forms of visual technologies employ black box production methods, whether in the chemicals of the dark room or the obscure physical and graphical casements of computer operations. While these technologies significantly complicate the nature of artistic claims to authorship, they also engender new forms of technolo…
The world wide web of carbon
The climate impacts of the information and communications technology sector-and Big Data especially-is a topic of growing public and industry concern, though attempts to quantify its carbon footprint have produced contradictory results. Some studies argue that information and communications technology's global carbon footprint is set to rise dramatically in the coming years, requiring urgent regulation and sectoral degrowth. Others argue that inf…
ICT environmentalism and the sustainability game
Over the past three decades, corporate branding has trended strongly towards environmental conscientiousness and green rhetoric, often heralded under the term “sustainability” – a broad and mutable rhetorical strategy that not only serves industry self-interest but is mobilized by civil society actors as well. This tension is especially apparent in the information communication technologies (ICT) sector. Employing Wittgenstein’s concept of the la…
Reflections on a hypothetical decentralized grassroots deployment solar geoengineering scenario
Spiral-scaling climate action
The notion that scholars should reduce consumption of workrelated flight travel as a form of climate action has become common in academia. Proponents of this idea have coalesced into a sectoral movement seeking to have a more significant impact. This article critically reflects on the case of the Academic Flying Less Movement (AFLM) to conceptually explore how the environmental concerns of individual scholars might cohere and coalesce into someth…
Flying the skies to wire the seas
Since the commercial aviation boom in the 1960s and 70s, the subsea cable industry has relied on global air travel for network development, infrastructure maintenance, and market penetration. However, COVID-19 disruptions forced a shift to remote work, challenging traditional travel practices and presenting an opportunity for carbon emission reduction. This study investigates the industry’s response to the “new normal” and its implications for mo…
The Pencil of Error
There is a strange inheritance between analog photography and digital images in regards to the confused agencies of their making. Both forms of visual technologies employ black box production methods, whether in the chemicals of the dark room or the obscure physical and graphical casements of computer operations. While these technologies significantly complicate the nature of artistic claims to authorship, they also engender new forms of technolo…
The Pencil of Error
There is a strange inheritance between analog photography and digital images in regards to the confused agencies of their making. Both forms of visual technologies employ black box production methods, whether in the chemicals of the dark room or the obscure physical and graphical casements of computer operations. While these technologies significantly complicate the nature of artistic claims to authorship, they also engender new forms of technolo…
Mediating Climate, Mediating Scale
Climate communication is seemingly stuck in a double bind. The problem of global warming requires inherently trans-scalar modes of engagement, encompassing times and spaces that exceed local frames of experience and meaning. Climate media must therefore negotiate representational extremes that risk overwhelming their audience with the immensity of the problem or rendering it falsely manageable at a local scale. The task of visualizing climate is …
Data Segregation and Algorithmic Amplification
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Simon Fraser University’s Canada 150 Research Chair in New Media in the School of Communication. She has studied both systems design engineering and English literature, which she combines and mutates in her current work on digital media. She is author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (Chun, 2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT, 2011), Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual…
Introduction
It is time for feminist media studies to refocus its attention on the body. Bodies matter in the ways in which they are differentiated, globally positioned, valued, shared, disrupted, erased, mis-r
Low-Carbon Research
This essay examines how the fossil fuel energy regimes that support contemporary academic norms in turn shape and constrain knowledge production. High-carbon research methods and exchanges, particularly those that depend on aviation, produce distinct exclusions and incentives that could be reformed in the transition to a low-carbon academy. Drawing on feminist STS, alternative modes of collective research creation and collaboration are outlined, …
Fiber, Fingers, and Code
This article describes how software is imagined and used to disrupt garment industry practices. Drawing from interviews, fieldwork, and discourse analysis of marketing from two companies, Stoll and Resonance, we argue that software is integral to the creation of a new kind of designer, a “digital craftsman,” that directly interfaces with a new kind of supply chain. This interaction is defined by its “seamlessness”—what we describe as both an emer…
The Gospel of Climate Skepticism
Review of: The Gospel of Climate Skepticism: Why Evangelical Christians Oppose Action on Climate Change , Robin Globus Veldman (2019) Oakland: University of California Press, 332 pp., ISBN 978-0-52030-367-6, p/bk, $29.95
Carbon Vitalism
This article names and examines carbon vitalism, a strain of climate denial centered on the moral recuperation of carbon dioxide—and thus fossil fuels. Drawing on interconnections between CO2, plant life, and human breath, carbon vitalists argue that carbon dioxide is not pollution but the stuff of life itself and thus possesses ethical and ecological standing. This philosophy contains a poetics of denial that is too often overlooked by studies o…
Reflections on a hypothetical decentralized grassroots deployment solar geoengineering scenario
What is environmental media studies so far
In this editorial introduction, we revisit the question: ‘What is environmental media studies?’ This provocation, raised in an exceptional article by founding co-editors Meryl Shriver-Rice and Hunter Vaughan in the journal’s first issue, continues to influence how the journal moves forward. However, under the leadership of a new editorial team, we reflect on the new directions and ongoing challenges presented by the interdisciplinary field of env…
ICT environmentalism and the sustainability game
Over the past three decades, corporate branding has trended strongly towards environmental conscientiousness and green rhetoric, often heralded under the term “sustainability” – a broad and mutable rhetorical strategy that not only serves industry self-interest but is mobilized by civil society actors as well. This tension is especially apparent in the information communication technologies (ICT) sector. Employing Wittgenstein’s concept of the la…
The world wide web of carbon
The climate impacts of the information and communications technology sector-and Big Data especially-is a topic of growing public and industry concern, though attempts to quantify its carbon footprint have produced contradictory results. Some studies argue that information and communications technology's global carbon footprint is set to rise dramatically in the coming years, requiring urgent regulation and sectoral degrowth. Others argue that inf…
On Being Anxious About Digital Carbon Emissions
This essay examines how many scholars-including myself-are thinking and feeling about growing concerns about the climate impacts of digital networks. Whether in news headlines, civil society reports, or peer presentations, we increasingly encounter alarming figures that link streaming video and cloud storage practices with a potential carbon time bomb. These digital environmental actors may lack a clear account of the relative impacts of a given …
De l’échange académique à faible impact carbone
Energy for the War Room
Background: This article examines the “energy war room,” a 2019 United Conservative Party campaign promise to build a new rapid response communications body to defend the Albertan oil and gas industry from critics online. Analysis: The authors explore the history of the war room concept and the long-running economic and social tensions in Canadian/Albertan staples state formations, analyzing how contradictory claims to weakness and strength struc…
Flying the skies to wire the seas
Since the commercial aviation boom in the 1960s and 70s, the subsea cable industry has relied on global air travel for network development, infrastructure maintenance, and market penetration. However, COVID-19 disruptions forced a shift to remote work, challenging traditional travel practices and presenting an opportunity for carbon emission reduction. This study investigates the industry’s response to the “new normal” and its implications for mo…
Spiral-scaling climate action
The notion that scholars should reduce consumption of workrelated flight travel as a form of climate action has become common in academia. Proponents of this idea have coalesced into a sectoral movement seeking to have a more significant impact. This article critically reflects on the case of the Academic Flying Less Movement (AFLM) to conceptually explore how the environmental concerns of individual scholars might cohere and coalesce into someth…
AI is trash
This commentary discusses the rise of generative machine learning tools (so-called artificial intelligence [AI]) and their joint informational and environmental harms. It takes the argumentative stance that most AI today can be usefully described as a kind of trash, both in terms of the quality of its outputs and its proliferating social and ecological costs. Extending the analogy further, it explores how the AI trash problem is best approached l…
Zines for Research Exchange
In this piece Anne Pasek and Aksel Biørn-Hansen interview each other on their respective experiments in zine-based experimental research exchange: DIY Methods, an annual conference-by-postal-mail, and Liminal Excavations, a zine-based intervention at ICT4S (Information and Communication Studies for Sustainability) 2024. They reflect on practical lessons they’ve learned in facilitating alternative publishing for academic research as well as some o…
Beyond redistribution
Prevailing just transition proposals often assume the continuity of colonial land relations and see ‘greener’ industrial development as a pathway to prosperity for all. Our paper aligns with and aims to contribute to emerging scholarship that questions these assumptions. Through a review of interdisciplinary just transition research, we map a distinction between mainstream, critical and reparative approaches to just transitions. Mainstream perspe…
Sustainable AI Research?
High-performance computing research, particularly concerning so-called artificial intelligence, is increasingly scrutinised for its environmental impacts. Many researchers are actively debating how to respond. Surveying recent English language research community publications, this paper identifies three distinct but overlapping proposed approaches to greening compute-heavy machine learning research: 1) efficiency, 2) the net benefit of downstream…
Political science (13 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Climate Change Communication and Perception (7 works) · Engineering (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Art (4 works)