Institutional procurement processes, technology support, and waste planning can encourage the shift towards sustainable practices by encouraging socially responsible and environmentally friendly technology options as well as supporting the proper disposal of digital devices. Yet digital technology purchased for research purposes often falls outside of traditional procurement processes, and researchers are left to their own devices in considering the extractive, imperialist, and neo-colonial practices of the life cycles of technology.

This project attends to the material ethics of multimodal tools and technologies by investigating the lives of these digital devices in academia while acknowledging the fact that the visual story is itself created in the context of doctoral research and academic culture. This project explores these issues with research-creation methods to advance an anthropology of the multimodal. By investigating the practices of technology procurement for research purposes and digital device disposal at the university level, this work offers a reflexive analysis of how scholars and researchers and their university systems are implicated in issues of sustainable technology.