Geographies of Digital Wasting: Electronic Waste from Mine to Discard and Back Again

The exhibit will be on display in the Annenberg Forum from October 16-25.

The Annenberg School for Communication and its Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication invite you to an exhibit and reception for "Geographies of Digital Wasting: Electronic Waste from Mine to Discard and Back Again."

The exhibit, put together by recent Annenberg graduate Lauren Bridges (Ph.D. '23) and doctoral candidate Zane Griffin Talley Cooper, runs from October 16-25, 2023 and the reception will take place on October 20 from 5-7pm in the Annenberg Forum.

About the Exhibit

This exhibit brings together a transnational team of researchers, funded by the Internet Society and supported by the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at Annenberg, to present findings from a two-year-long study on the global flows of e-waste. The exhibit draws connections between the four primary sites that underpin the research project, each related to a section of the tech supply chain, including: extraction of rare earth minerals in Arctic, waste produced in silicon chips manufacturing in Taiwan and Silicon Valley, waste produced by logistics and industrial cloud computing in the United States, to the environmental and health-related impacts of e-waste processing and dumping sites in Zimbabwe. The exhibit includes photography from each site, multimedia projects (such as VR and video essays), activist media such as zines, and traditional scholarly research posters. 

Because e-waste is the fastest waste stream on the planet and because there are known global inequities in where and how it accumulates and how it flows through and between global sites, it is imperative that we address this issue through a transnational perspective. The implications of connection-making across contexts in our research cannot be overstated: as climate change continues to shape life on our planet, we know that its effects will be distributed disproportionately along political, racial, and economic lines. This exhibit tells the story of the global processes of digital wasting with the aim of informing policy and practices to combat the climate injustices associated with e-waste.

Exhibit Participants

Extraction, Greenland

• Zane Griffin Talley Cooper (Doctoral Fellow at the Center for Advanced Research on Global Communication and PhD Candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication)

Manufacture, Taiwan and Silicon Valley

• Ingrid Burrington (Affiliate at the Center for Advanced Research on Global Communication)
• Ann Chen (Affiliate at the Center for Advanced Research on Global Communication)

Operation, Virginia and Southern California

• Lauren E. Bridges (Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and Affiliate of the Center for Advanced Research on Global Communication)

Discard, Zimbabwe

• Dr. Vusumuzi Maphosa (Researcher at the Internet Society Zimbabwe Chapter)
• Dr. Margaret Macherera (Researcher at the Internet Society Zimbabwe Chapter)
• Jasper Mangwana (Researcher at the Internet Society Zimbabwe Chapter)
• David Zezai (Researcher at the Internet Society Zimbabwe Chapter)