Hanging on a Wire
Jen Liu · CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts · 2022
How will we stay connected amidst a climate crisis? Conditions associated with climate change, such as sea level rise and increasing extreme weather events, can destabilize already vulnerable network and digital infrastructures. While existing infrastructures are in dire need of maintenance, additional infrastructures are simultaneously being built to address imbalances in network access and distribution. My dissertation project attends to these intersecting precarities as a way to reconsider how digital infrastructures can be reworked to address overlapping questions of environmental and digital inequities. My research is situated within marginalized coastal communities in south Louisiana, where legacies of petrochemical extraction has led to deep socioeconomic and ecological disparities, while increased intensity of storms and floods have begun to impede and damage an already sparse network infrastructure. In my project, I use archival, ethnographic, and design research methods to examine longer histories of environmental degradation, investigate current practices of maintaining and developing network infrastructures, and develop approaches for researchers in HCI and related computing fields to re-envision just and equitable network infrastructures.