Academics from the Department of Digital Humanities lead the new network examining digital infrastructures and climate realities.
Digital X Climates, an interdisciplinary network dedicated to advancing research, dialogue and public engagement on the entanglements of digital technologies with environmental, social and political ecologies, has been launched at King's.
Digital X Climates is co-led by Dr Anna Watkins Fisher, Senior Lecturer in Digital Media & Culture, Dr Sebastián Lehuedé, Lecturer in Ethics, AI and Society, and Dr Güneş Tavmen, Lecturer in Digital Infrastructures and Sustainability, from the Department of Digital Humanities at King's. The network is affiliated with the Digital Futures Institute's Centre for Digital Culture and Centre of Ecologies of Attention and Perception.
The network launched with a keynote lecture by Dr Matthew Canfield, Associate Professor at Leiden Law School, on resisting surveillance agriculture in the Majority World.
Challenging narratives of digital immateriality and limitless innovation, Digital X Climates sheds light on the environmental costs and uneven human consequences of contemporary digital technologies.
We share as co-leads of Digital X Climates a growing sense of urgency about the relationship between contemporary digital technologies and the things we value most-our ecological and social worlds, and their ability to survive into the future. The X in our name marks the open variable of scholarly inquiry into this crossing-where digital infrastructures and climate realities meet, clash, and transform each other. The ground is shifting fast: tech companies are racing to define digital futures that rely on environmental extraction, even as they claim technology will fix the very crises it helps produce. At the same time, climate change is driving profound and unequal disruptions across economies, politics, ecosystems, and communities. As academics, we believe our work can-and must-be part of this wider conversation about how digital technologies shape the possibility of more just and sustainable futures.
Dr Anna Watkins Fisher, Dr Sebastián Lehuedé & Dr Güneş Tavmen
Bringing together digital humanities scholars working on topics from data centres and extractive supply chains to platforms, algorithms, and networked devices, the group asks how digital systems intensify the climate crisis and global inequality, and how they might be reimagined otherwise.
Through collaborative research and exchange, Digital X Climates seeks to imagine alternative techno-ecological futures grounded in sustainability, justice and collective care.
Contributing to the week of the Digital x Climates launch, Paul Schütze, Postdoctoral Researcher in the Ethics and Critical Theories of AI group at the University of Osnabrück, Germany, will deliver a lunchtime seminar talk titled 'A Social Critique of AI amid the Climate Crisis' on 19 February 2026.
