Janna Frenzel
Janna Frenzel is a PhD student in Communication Studies at Concordia University (supervisor: Dr Alessandra Renzi). Her doctoral research focuses on the materiality and sociotechnical imaginaries of computing and attempts to decarbonize digital infrastructures. Her research is supported by a Concordia University Graduate Fellowship (2019-2023) and a SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier doctoral scholarship (2021-2024). Before starting her PhD, Janna worked as a communication strategist and writer/editor for the non-profit sector. She holds a BA and MA in Political Science from the Free University of Berlin. Her MA thesis looked at social movement organizing and other forms of protest with a focus on youth revolts.
Contact: janna.frenzel@mail.concordia.ca or find her at https://www.jannafrenzel.com/
Projects
Dissertation project (ongoing): “Green” computing: Re-imagining and co-creating digital infrastructures in communal and corporate settings (working title)
This dissertation project asks how the relationship between digital technologies and humans, non-humans, land, and climate is (re)mediated through different sets of infrastructural practices and cultural imaginaries that are sometimes referred to as “green” computing. By looking at examples from both corporate and non-profit, communal settings, it investigates how attempts to decarbonize the Internet play out within tensions between continued extractive logics and approaches that try to re-imagine digital communication and energy infrastructures around principles of collective ownership, decentralization, and reciprocity.
Digital Divides, 2020-2022, research assistant:
This project explores the connections between Montreal’s housing crisis and processes of gentrification related to the city’s growing AI industry, specifically its impact on the neighbourhood of Parc Extension. Report available online.
Memes in Canadian Politics, 2019-2020, research assistant:
This project is a first major study of the role of memes in Canadian federal elections, experimenting with large-scale computational methods as well as established methods for studying political communication in order to understand the online circulation and encoding of politics and partisanship through memes.
New Nature, 2020, respondent/interviewer: An immersive media and climate science exchange between researchers, artists, and activists from Canada, Germany, Mexico, and the US hosted by the Goethe Institute of Montreal, New Nature explored immersive technologies for conversations around climate change and reflection on desirable futures.
Publications
Paola Mosso and Janna Frenzel. 2023. “Decentralized and rooted in care: envisioning the digital infrastructures of the future“, Branch Magazine, Issue 6: Green Screen
Janna Frenzel, Tamara Kneese and Benjamin Peters. 2023. “Labor: How tech worker organizing intersects with climate action“, Branch Magazine, Issue 5: Critical Carbon Computing
Janna Frenzel. 2023. “Data Rush: How ‘Green’ Computing is Opening Up a New Frontier in Arctic Norway”, in White, Darcy, Julia Peck, and Chris Goldie (eds.): Disturbed ecologies: geopolitics and the northern landscape in the era of environmental crisis
Transcript. Janna Frenzel. 2023. “Caring for things that are broken: Repair of electronics as counterpoint to disposability”, in: Brunner, Christoph, Grit Marti Lange, and nate wessalowski (eds.). Technopolitics of Care, transversal. [in German, English version forthcoming]
Helen A. Hayes and Janna Frenzel. 2023. “Techno-Solutionism and Strategies of Delay: The Bay du Nord Development Project“. Heliotrope.
Janna Frenzel and Sarah-Louise Ruder. 2023. “Can the heat from running computers help grow our food? It’s complicated“. The Conversation.
Janna Frenzel and lee wilkins. 2022. “Salvaging” (a zine about reuse and repair produced for and presented at the 2022 DIY Methods conference)
Janna Frenzel with Fenwick McKelvey and Bart Simon. 2022. “Imagining an AI Commons” (report).
Fenwick McKelvey, Scott DeJong, and Janna Frenzel. 2021. “Memes, Scenes and #elxn2019s: How Partisans Make Memes during Elections.” New Media & Society 1-22.
Janna Frenzel. 2018. “The pressure to condemn: narrating the Stockholm riot of 2013”, in Starodub, A. and Robinson, A. (eds.). Riots and Militant Occupations, Rowman & Littlefield
Edited works
“Riots” special issue of urban studies journal sub\urban. zeitschrift für kritische stadtforschung, 4(1), co-edited with Phillipe Greif, Fabian Klein and Sarah Uhlmann (2016) [in German]
Activities
Janna is a member of the following research and reading groups:
Anti-Colonial Environmental Studies reading group (ACES)
Extraction/Extractivism Reading Group