Our keynote lineup for the upcoming event in Bochum is now confirmed, and will provide a rich framing for the case work on Thursday and papers presented on Friday.
Opening keynote
The opening keynote of Before Ruins will be delivered by Anne Pasek from Trent University. Anne Pasek is an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Media, Culture and the Environment at Trent University in Canada. She studies the cultural politics of climate change and the ways they are so often entangled with the tech sector. She is also an editor of the Journal of Environmental Media and the director of the Experimental Methods and Media Lab.
AI in 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 the conference's temporal theme to sketch what these infrastructures might mean and do in the future, as industrial ruins. It take 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 is was and what it can become.
Introduction to Ruhr Valley
Uli Paetzel, the director of the Emscher Cooperative Lippe will present on socio‑ecological transitions in the Ruhr region.
Panel Planetary Entanglements of Science and Technology
Continuing the first day of the conference, after the opening and a break, we host an interdisciplinary and creative panel on the matters of “Before Ruins.”
- Tina Asmussen (Early Modern Mining History at Ruhr University Bochum, and head of the mining history research department at the German Mining Museum).
- Sandra Maß (International History at Ruhr University Bochum)
- Jörg Niewöhner (Department of Science, Technology and Society at Technical University of Munich)
- Katia Schwerzmann (Department of Media Studies at Ruhr University Bochum)
In this panel, we turn to the lively troubles of the Anthropocene and ask how standing before the ruins can inform engaged STS research. The panel proceeds in three steps and is moderated by Laura Kocksch and Stefan Laser, co-organizers of Before Ruins. First, the moderators will introduce and engage with the panelists. We discuss empirical, conceptual and institutional challenges and weave in questions about hope. Every panelists brings a particular perspective and signature examples. Second, and importantly, the discussion will open to integrate reflections, challenges and hopes that the audience has on their mind. This, third, will help us close the discussion and frame the case work and presentations that are to follow: the heart of the event. Cheers.
Closing keynote by Endre Dányi: The vintage, the mouldy and the tarnished: Valuing STS cases in the aftermath
On the third day, after plenty of case-ing and discussions, Endre Dányi (Sociology of Globalization, University of the Bundeswehr Munich) will close off the conference with a reflection on the collective journey titled The vintage, the mouldy and the tarnished: Valuing STS cases in the aftermath.
STS as an interdisciplinary field has been centred around empirically rich and conceptually generative case studies. For some time, such cases seemed ageless: accounts of bicycles, scallops, photocopy machines, the Zimbabwe bush pump, the garden of Versailles, genetically modified mice, matsutake mushrooms – to name just a few – have served as reliable orientation points for STS scholars across the globe. What would happen to our accounts if we developed a sensitivity to the ways cases age? What STS-world would we inhabit in what Hannah Landecker calls ‘the aftermath’? This closing talk will engage with these questions with the help of specific cases at the Before Ruins conference.