As part of the 2025-2026 FlashLab seminar season, the first session of our quarterly "Environment & Digital Technologies" series will take place online on Thursday, April 2 (4:00-5:30 pm, CET). 

We are delighted to welcome Jen Liu, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. She works with the Toronto Climate Observatory and will present a talk drawing on her Ph.D. in Information Science at Cornell University: 

Abstract: As climate change accelerates, infrastructures are increasingly strained by environmental volatility and political neglect. This presentation introduces infrastructural retreat as a concept to describe the gradual withdrawal, degradation, and abandonment of infrastructure. Drawing on ethnographic and design research in southeast Louisiana, I examine how networked infrastructures, particularly Internet connectivity, are maintained amid overlapping ecological disruption, aging systems, and deep socioeconomic inequality rooted in the region’s petrochemical legacy. I show how practices of infrastructural maintenance, repair, and anticipation shape climate habitability by sustaining or denying connection in shifting coastal landscapes. I argue that infrastructural retreat contributes to and conditions climate displacement, redistributing risk onto communities through degraded service and precarious labor. I conclude by discussing how these insights informed the co-design of a community-based communications network, and what infrastructural retreat reveals about the politics of adaptation and survival on a changing planet.

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Session links and other practical information are available through the seminar mailing list. You can subscribe here: flashlab@framalistes.org 

The rest of the season’s program will soon be available on the seminar website.

Looking forward to seeing you online!

All the best,