Zane Griffin Talley Cooper

Zane Griffin Talley Cooper (He/Him) is a multimodal scholar and educator whose work broadly concerns the intersections and relations between data infrastructures, energy production, and resource extraction in the Arctic. A multimodal scholar with a passion for sustainability, he has held positions at Intel, the Civic Software Foundation, and the McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology, where, in various capacities, he has explored the nexus of technology and environmental justice.

His work has found its way into journals, art exhibits, design projects, film festivals, and he is the co-author of Digital Energetics, published by the University of Minnesota Press. Through a grant from the Internet Society Foundation, Cooper and his research team recently published an expansive multimedia exhibition entitled Geographies of Digital Wasting: Electronic Waste From Mine to Discard and Back Again, which has shown at the University of Pennsylvania, Virginia Tech, and is currently online at https://www.geographiesofdigitalwasting.com. 

At St. Lawrence University, Cooper teaches a range of courses, including Introduction to Digital Media & Film and Environmental Media. As a filmmaker and multimodal researcher, he is currently working on a V.R. project about the specter of rare earth mining in South Greenland. He looks forward to helping students develop both critical and production skills that will equip them to better understand and communicate complex relationships between the digital world and the environment.