Join the RUSTlab lectures this Winter 2026/27

This winter term 2026/27 we present to you our 16th round of RUSTlab Lectures. Come and join us for these exciting talks and discussions around this term’s guiding theme Sacrificial Intelligence on four dates in the winterterm – online and on site.

Smart borders, artificial intelligence and the cloud promise to be clean, efficient and sustainable. This lecture series looks behind the shiny facades and asks what gets sacrificed so that infrastructures can appear smart. Data centres consume water, energy and land. Workers and communities bear the costs of extraction. People on the move are sorted by databases with political biases. Regulation, meanwhile, often amounts to little more than paperwork. Guest speakers from media studies, communication science and law trace the gaps between promise and material reality: destructive, exploitative, corroding, unenforced. Join us to rethink who pays the price for intelligence.

List of speakers for the winter term 2026/27:

Thu 2026-11-05 16:00 – Mitch Pfeifer (Ruhr University Bochum):
Before ›Smart‹ Borders

Thu 2026-11-19 14:00 – Julia Bee & Gerko Egert (Ruhr University Bochum):
Extractivism. Cooperative, Intersectional, and Climate Justice Perspectives on AI Infrastructures

Thu 2026-12-03 14:00 – Alberto Quintavalla & Orlin Yalnazov (Rotterdam):
The Regulation of Data Centres in EU Law

Thu 2027-01-28 16:00 – Sigrid Kannengiesser (University of Münster):
Rusty AI? About Unsustainable AI Infrastructures
+ Workshop on Fri 2027-01-29 morning

Download this year’s poster as a PDF.