Senior Lecturer, Media Studies
Sy is a co-director of the Massey University Political Ecology Research Centre and is one of the centre’s founding members.
His research interests include political ecologies of digital media, digital media and political activism, the material impacts of media hardware, pervasive/locative media, software studies, social media and peer-to-peer production.
Sy has co-edited two anthology volumes arising from PERC conferences: Ecological Entanglements in the Anthropocene with Nick Holm and Plastic Legacies: Pollution, Persistence, and Politics with Trisia Farrelly and Ian Shaw.
Sy has published widely around the environmental impacts of digital technologies in journals including Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, New Media and Society, Media, Culture and Society, Cultural Politics, Culture Machine, and The European Journal of Media Studies among others.
Sy also makes documentary/activist films, including for environmental groups such as the Environment Network Manawatu and Carrying Our Future.
Selected publications
- Taffel, S. (2024). The IRREPARABLE HARMS of OIL. Cultural Politics. 20(2), 367-369
- Taffel, S. (2023). AirPods and the earth: Digital technologies, planned obsolescence and the Capitalocene. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. 6(1), 433-454
- Taffel, S. (2023). Data and oil: Metaphor, materiality and metabolic rifts. New Media and Society. 25(5), 980-998
- Taffel, S. (2021). Google’s lens: computational photography and platform capitalism. Media, Culture and Society. 43(2), 237-255
- Taffel, S. (2019). Automating Creativity. Screenworks. 10(1) [link]
- Taffel, S. (2018). Hopeful extinctions? Tesla, technological solutionism and the anthropocene. Culture Unbound. 10(2), 163-184
- Taffel, S. (2016). Perspectives on the postdigital: Beyond rhetorics of progress and novelty. Convergence. 22(3), 324-338
- Taffel, S. (2016). Technofossils of the anthropocene: Media, geology, and plastics. Cultural Politics. 12(3), 355-375
- Taffel, SA. (2016). Technofossils of the anthropocene: Media, geology, and plastics. Cultural Politics. 12(3 November 2016), 355-375
- Taffel, S. (2015). Archaeologies of electronic waste. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology. 2(1), 78-85
- Taffel, SA. (2015). Towards an ethical electronics? Ecologies of Congolese conflict minerals. Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture. 10(1), 18-33
- Taffel, SA. (2015). Archaeologies of Electronic Waste. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology. 2(1), 78-85