The world is experiencing... the breakdown of natural and social systems, exacerbated by digital inequality, unsustainable resource usage and digital colonialism. Technologies once designed to connect and share knowledge are increasingly used to divide, exploit and extract.
At the 6th SustainableICT Winter School, we will bring together diverse voices with the aim to connect visions of sustainability and build more resilient digital futures.
The ICT sector plays a contradictory role in shaping sustainable futures. While technologies promise optimisation, dematerialisation, and access to knowledge, are also driving economic division, extractivism, rebound effects, disinformation, and surveillance. These ambivalent positions of ICT act as both a contributor to and a potential mitigator of the overlapping ecological and social crises we face.
We aim to explore these tensions across planetary and societal boundaries—from the environmental cost of digital infrastructure to the erosion of public trust and democratic processes. We’ll look at how technological optimism can delay climate action and how narratives of open source and AI are being co-opted to sustain business-as-usual.
These complex issues require interdisciplinary thinking, blending different approaches and connecting visions.
The SustainableICT Winter School is an interdisciplinary event that emphasises learning and doing. It includes lectures, panels and interactive workshops. Throughout the week, academics, politicians, artists, and activists will come together to analyse and challenge the usage and effects of ICT across the globe.
We will start by examining the past, how ICT was built and integrated in the world around us. We will then dissect the present relationship between technology, politics, and the economy. Finally, we will end the week by drawing the line between ICT and social injustice, as well exploring ways of dealing with the consequences – to build a more resilient future.
We invite people from diverse communities, academic fields, the industry and arts to come together for a five-day English language winter school from the 1st to the 5th of September, held at Université Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium.
Early-Bird Tickets will be available shortly. For details on scholarship – please contact info@sictdoctoralschool.com. For the latest information sign up to our mailing list. To see what we did last year please take a look at our archive and our YouTube Channel.