Environing Media - One of Those Smart Books
The book Environing Media, edited by Division researcher Adam Wickberg and former colleague Johan Gärdebo, was published in the early fall of 2022. It interrogates the role of media technologies in the formation of environments, understood both as physical spaces and as epistemological constructs about them. Using the concept of ‘environing media’, the book advances a deeper understanding of how media processes – defined here as the storage, process, and transmission of data – influence human-Earth relations. Jussi Parikka reviewed the book for the Leonardo network.
From the review:
"Environing Media is one of those smart books that presents interesting case studies while offering a platform for a broader discussion converging with environmental media studies with a dose of history of science thrown in for good measure. Needless to say, this is an exciting combination of disciplines and methods that is driven by the realization of the centrality of technological infrastructures, scientific instruments, and mediating discourses for understanding climate change (and related issues from fossil fuel cultures to air pollution). The editors Adam Wickberg and Johan Gärdebo have firm links with the KTH (Stockholm) Environmental Humanities Laboratory in the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment (either as graduates or current affiliated researchers) that itself has been a central institution in developing the notion of “environing” in relation to technological cultures."