Current Projects
Locomotive engines plumed with steam and smoke are an icon of nineteenth century industrialisation, an aesthetic subject for the artists. During almost a century and a half, they have also been a source of nuisances and the subject of many complaints and legal conflicts, most of them about black smoke emission. Multiple factors increased the problem throughout the period, to the point locomotives were acknowledged as a major contributor to urban atmospheric pollution.
The project will take the smoke example to discuss the railway industry as a polluting industry, with energetic micro transitions having multi-scale consequences on its environment from mere inconveniences to a public health problem. It will compare smoke abatement solutions circulating between different national spaces in Northwestern Europe (Belgium, France and the UK), from legislation and regulatory constraints to technological and managerial innovation, and evaluate their efficiency by confronting official sources to the complaints archived from railway neighbors and workers.
Digital growth and optimization is often depicted in the general public as weightless and non-materially situated: disembodied from our earth and its circuits of raw minerals extraction, purification and assemblage. Taking the counterpoint of such rhetorical tropes, my thesis will map the environmentally situated practices of computing by zooming-in at the level of the Graphical Processing Unit (GPU): the ubiquitous and critical computer chip accelerator required to power our actual digital landscape driven by energy intensive processes ranging artificial intelligence to 3D immersive environments. To this end, this research work will inquire about these environmental human practices of computing by focusing on two socio-technical contexts where computing and the environment intertwine: 1) GPU thermal optimization through overclocking and 2) informal recycling of the GPU metal debris located in the electronic waste landfill of Agbogbloshie, Ghana. As a research-through-design PhD, it will also address these environmentally situated practices by combining academic research and fieldwork with hands-on critical and speculative design projects: inquiring about the ecological infrastructure of computing at the level of the materiality of the GPU itself. In opposition to these internet discourses, such hybrid inquiries will be foundational in order to address, map and speculate in an open-ended way about the past, present and near-future intersections and connection between computing power and our earth processes and materials.
This research project proposes to use the history of eucalyptus to study the environmental, technical, scientific and social transformations brought about by the planting and exploitation of this ‘new’ tree from the mid-19th to the 20th century in the Mediterranean region. In this research project, I aim to show how the planting of eucalyptus trees and the choice of species planted by various economic and political actors reveal their relationship with the environment and the environmental, social, political and economic agenda they seek to impose on a particular environment. I also intend to show how eucalyptus plantations are transforming the Mediterranean environment. This research is limited to France and the countries of the Mediterranean basin, from North Africa to the Middle East, which came under European domination between the 19th century and the interwar period. Planted in all the colonies around the Mediterranean, eucalyptus can be considered a tree-tool of colonisation and one of its symbols, while in Europe it has become a tree-tool for managing the environment and its resources.
Completed Projects
Combining historical analysis with socio-ethnographic approaches, this project traces the evolution of the use and conservation of crop diversity from the Green Revolution to date. The historical perspective is mainly based on the archives of the Rockefeller Foundation, which include the Ford Foundation projects. The fieldwork concentrates on two staple crops (maize and rice) and three International Agricultural Research Centers in Mexico, the Philippines and China.
The first goal is to study the history of plant breeding in relationship with plant genetic resources conservation. The second goal is to identify what made competing approaches either dominant or marginal. The overall aim is to contribute to foster the use of agrobiodiversity in food systems, connecting conservation efforts with evolutionary plant breeding and participatory approaches.
This project is funded by a Future Food Initiative fellowship.
