bodner094

. So I'm on a sabbatical and I'm currently in Barcelona, visiting the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona to learn more about Degrowth ( see my previous blog post ). I've been here for two weeks now and feel it is time to share some reflections about my time here this far. First on more professional aspects of my visit but then followed by some more personal thoughts. One really cool thing is that ICTA (or rather some persons at ICTA) organise a reading group on Degrowth. Also researchers from other universities are invited and the reading group doubles as a social activity - they meet in somebody's home about once per month and everybody brings something to eat or drink. Here's the introduction to the program for the academic year 2017/2018: Barcelona Reading group on Degrowth Organized by Research & Degrowth and ICTA-UAB This is the 7th year of the Research & Degrowth / ICTA reading group. The ...

. I'm in Barcelona and I am more specifically visiting Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals/Institute of Environmental Science and Technology ( ICTA ) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona ( UBA ). This is the epicenter of research on Degrowth  - and that's why I'm here. As part of my (very sparse) "duties" here, I gave a talk this past week on "Sustainability and Computing" (and on Computing within Limits ). The talk was loosely shaped around our recently-accepted (but not-yet-published article) " Computing within Limits ". I realised only a few hours before the talk that I didn't actually know how long my talk was supposed to be. The answer was around 30 minutes. I got 35 and managed to run through almost all of my 75 images since I can talk fast and can nowadays adapt my talk on the fly. I only skipped three images - they were too interesting and would have required at least another 5 minutes to explain/discuss). That talk wa...

. I'm on a sabbatical and I'm currently in Barcelona  where I arrived 10 days ago. But, as Sherry Turkle  said in her book " Alone together ": " a vacation usually means working from someplace picturesque . […] On vacation, one vacates a place, not a set of responsibilities ". To some extent I have been working "as usual" but from a different place and not seldom with daily (often multiple) conference calls about academic papers and other projects. That was especially true last week. I had a deadline for a research grant application on Wednesday February 14 and I spent a sizable part of the first week here in Barcelona in front of the computer, working together with my colleagues in Sweden in a race to perfectify our application, " Turning black swans white: Creating scenarios for envisioning sustainable futures " [Förvandla svarta svanar till vita: Att bygga scenarier för hållbara framtider]. The application was handed in to the Swedish ...

. I wrote a blog post in early September about a (small) research grant application we handed in to The Swedish Council for Sustainable Development [Formas] with the facile name " A systematic review of the scientific literature on digital interventions for more sustainable food consumption behaviours ". The internal code name for the project is just "FOOD" and the applicants were (besides me): Björn Hedin (project leader), Elina Eriksson and Cecilia Katzeff. We got the money and will spend 20% of our time this year (2018) working on this literature review/synthesis (Björn will as project leader spend 30%) and we will probably work with  the "Hoffice" methodology  during the spring (once a week around my kitchen table). We have kicked off the project with meetings where we plan the project as well as meetings with each of our three project partners: - The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency (Naturvårdverket) - Jan 24 meeting - The Swedish Consumer Age...

. A friend of mine send me a short message with a link to the upcoming conference " Petrocultures " only 10 days before the deadline for abstracts. It looked like a really interesting conference, here's part of the call for papers: ​ Petrocultures is motivated by the core notion that the humanities and social sciences have significant input to add to both knowledge of oil and energy and the irrevocable process of transformation. ... While much work has been done to highlight the social and cultural significance of fossil fuels, the ecological unfeasibility of high-carbon life urgently compels us to think, imagine and realize a world ‘after oil’. ... The conference will provide an important forum for examining and extending existent framings and sitings of oil and petroculture, while also striving to consider the social, cultural, and aesthetic life of alternative forms of energy, such as wind, solar, and hydro power. ​... Petrocultures 2018 will bring together scholars, p...

. I read the books below 16 months ago, in October 2016. All three books were written 35-40 year ago and what unites them is that they contain or related to the radical thoughts of Ivan Illich and E. F. Schumacher. The asterisks (*) represent the number of quotes that can be found further down in this blog post.  Here's the previous blog post about books I have read. *********** I've been interested in Ivan Illich 's radical thoughts for a long time but " Shadow work " (1981) is the first full book of his that I have read. It's not so much a book as a collection of (five) essays that circle around a topic, work , but with threads leading in many different directions all the time. This is primarily a book about work and the (ballooning) unpaid work that is necessary to perform in order to perform paid work in order to get a salary in order to survive in modern society. Like the daily commute that can easily take hours or spending time shopping and maintaining...

. We handed in an application last week (January 30) for organizing an international workshop, " Looking backwards to the future: Studying the future with counterfactuals ", at the Lorentz Center (Leiden University, the Netherlands). The workshop will be held sometime during the first quarter of 2019 if our application is granted and our preferences are for mid-February. I attended (taught at)  a summer school  at the Lorentz Center this past summer and our (now-accepted) paper " Undesigning the Internet " is in fact a spin-off from that summer school.  The Lorentz center  is an  excellent  place to organize a workshop. It's an international center for scientific workshops and their slogan is " you do the research, we do the rest ". Organizing workshops (with economic support from the Dutch state) is their core business and they organize no less than 80 workshops per year at their two facilities on the campus of Leiden University. Here's the 2018 p...

. Great news! Our article " Computing within Limits " has been accepted for publication in ACM 's journal "Communications of the ACM" (CACM). The article is written by Bonnie Nardi , Bill Tomlinson , Don Patterson , Jay Chen , Daniel Pargman , Barath Raghavan and Birgit Penzenstadler and this is a Big Thing for us as the print version of Communications of the ACM has a " readership of over 100,000 ACM members "! " As the world’s largest computing society, ACM strengthens the profession's collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ... Founded at the dawn of the computer age, ACM’s reach extends to every part of the globe, with more than half of its 100,000 members residing outside the U.S. " Communications of the ACM is ACM's flagship journal and it reaches all ACM members everywhere in the world. We submitted our article in August and we imagined that t...