Adam Wickberg is a researcher in the history of media and environment at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. He received his PhD in 2016 from Stockholm University and the Research School in Cultural History. In 2013-2014 he was a visiting scholar at Stanford University. His thesis on the nexus of media, power, and politics in early modern Spain was turned into a monograph book titled Pellucid Paper: Poetry and Bureaucratic Media in Early Modern Spain (London: Open Humanities Press, 2018).
Wickberg currently works with several scholars at KTH in the project The Mediated Planet: Claiming Data for Environmental SDGs, which explores the global environment as emerging through environmental data and asks how data gathering practices, data access, and data ownership shape environmental perception and politics. In this context, he is particularly focusing on the relation between artificial intelligence and the global environment. At the MPIWG, he is also a member of the working group Anthropocene Formations.
In addition, Wickberg is currently preparing a monograph book focusing on the role of the ocean in the making of the global environment tentatively titled Colonial Elements: Oceanic Media and Wet Globalization 1550-1650. He is also co-editor of a forthcoming volume titled Environing Media (Routledge, 2022) featuring essays from scholars of media and environmental humanities. The volume probes the new theoretical concept of “environing media” as an analytical tool that can account for how media produce environmental epistemologies in different historical times, from early modern nautical charts to current climate models.
His research interests include media history and theory, digital cultures, AI, extractivism, environmental humanities, environmental history, ocean humanities, and the Anthropocene.
Publications
AI and the Global Environment. History & Technology, (in review). |
Where Humans and the Planetary Conflate—An Introduction to Environing Media. Humanities (2020) 9:3. https://doi.org/10.3390/h9030065 |
Reconfiguring Temporality in the Anthropocene: Coloniality and the Political Eco-Crisis. Resillience: Journal of the Environmental Humanities (2020), vol 8, no. 1. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/784316/summary |
“Temporal Poetics of Planetary Transformations: Alexander von Humboldt and the Geo-Anthropological History of America”, in Times of History, Times of Nature: Temporalization and the Limits of Modern Knowledge (Berghan Books, 2021), ed. Anders Ekström & Staffan Bergwik. |
Environing Media (Routledge, 2022), co-edited w. Johan Gärdebo. |
Plus Ultra: Coloniality and the Mapping of American Natureculture in the Empire of Philipp II. Necsus: European Journal of Media Studies (2018), vol. 7, no. 2. https://mediarep.org/bitstream/handle/doc/4216/NECSUS_2018_7_2_205-227_Wickberg_Plus_ultra_.pdf?sequence=6 |
Projects
IV. Anthropocene Formations
Presentations, Talks, & Teaching Activities
Histories of Nature and Environments:Shaping Landscapes, University of Lisbon
The Shape of a Practice, HKW Berlin
Anthropocene Colloquium, MPIWG
Posthumanities Hub/ Linköping University
STREAMS: Transformative Environmental Humanities, KTH Royal Institute of Technology