Environmental Humanities Symposium from 9-10AM on October 17, 2026 in EV1408

[Arts Communications]

I’m pleased to announce Keynote Speaker Dr. Anne Pasek, who will be opening our first-ever Environmental Humanities Symposium from 9-10AM on  October 17, 2026 in EV1408. You can view the complete schedule here<https://uwaterloo.ca/environmental-humanities-network/environmental-humanities-symposium>; morning events are free and open to the public.

Please distribute widely to your networks, and do forgive any duplicate emails. A poster is attached, and a précis of Dr. Pasek’s talk is below:


“AI Before the Ruins: Industry and Inquiry Before and After the Bubble”

How should we study something like "AI"—a subject of social and capital investment that rests more on speculative promises than given technologies or use cases? A committed focus on infrastructure and material throughputs is one possibility, yet the pace and breadth of current rates of AI's data centre expansion make it hard to parse the whole of this unfolding and geographically differentiated story. This talk will experiment with a slightly different approach, inverting our temporal horizons to sketch what these infrastructures might mean and do in the future, as industrial ruins. It takes as a foundational premise that current AI development efforts can be characterized as a financial bubble, with irrational investment and unproven use cases, that will eventually pop. When it does, it will leave behind large quantities of energy and compute infrastructures that presume fixed forms of use. Some will be amenable to salvage and reappropriation into other ways of living; others will persist only as waste. Drawing on political economic analyses of the tech sector, as well as a broader set of speculative fabulation practices by fellow data centre scholars, the talk will place AI in the past tense in order to assess both what it was and what it can become.



Anne Pasek is an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Media, Culture and the Environment at Trent University. She studies the cultural politics of climate change and its intersections with the digital tech sector.

Please feel free to contact me with any questions about the event at jclarylemon at uwaterloo.ca<mailto:jclarylemon at uwaterloo.ca>.

All my best,

Jen


________________________________________________________________________________________________

You are receiving this email because you are part of the Arts Announce email list from the Faculty of Arts.
About Arts Announce<https://uwaterloo.ca/arts-faculty-staff-resources/communication/artsannounce-email-list> | Unsubscribe<mailto:artsannounce-leave at artslist.uwaterloo.ca?subject=Please%20unscubscribe%20me%20from%20artsannounce> from Arts Announce.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://artsservices.uwaterloo.ca/pipermail/artsannounce/attachments/20260922/92b216a7/attachment.htm>