CFP: “Digital Futures in the Making: Imaginaries, Politics, and Materialities”

The 9th dgv Conference of the Section “Digitisation in Everyday Life”, taking place at the Institute of Anthropological Studies in Culture and History at the University of Hamburg on 15-16 September 2022 (tbc), is now open for submissions. The conference theme is “Digital Futures in the Making: Imaginaries, Politics, and Materialities”.

We strongly encourage the participation of early-career researchers of all levels (PhD & post-doc), young professionals and graduate research students interested in future-making and digitisation. Possible themes include but are not limited to:

• How should we live in the digital age: What are modes of living that acknowledge the open-endedness and contingency of digital cultures? Which imaginaries or even utopias are envisioned? How do they already shape ongoing digital transformations?
• Mundanisation of digital technologies: How do people negotiate futures and appropriate the digital within their everyday lives? Which resistances, counterculture(s), and creative practices emerge in everyday life and social movements?
• Digital infrastructuring and materialities: In this section, we are concerned with not only the often-hidden infrastructures (including data, code, algorithms, etc.), in which power and governmentality are embedded and materialised, but also with the profound knowledge gap that exists between platforms, institutions, and the vast majority of people that use and co-produce digital media. Furthermore, we are interested in how digital expressions, artefacts, and the stakeholders who develop them shape how digital cultures are realised.
• Futures of digital anthropology and open science: Digital media have also become instruments of analysis of researchers in cultural anthropology and related disciplines of technoscience. Open science poses new challenges to ethnographic research with regard to research data management, data infrastructures and ethics. How do digital technologies create new possibilities for ethnographic research and academic knowledge production itself? What challenges and ethical questions may arise for qualitative and empirical research in sensitive fields?
        

We welcome individual papers and panels as well as experimental workshops and transdisciplinary studios to discuss everything from ongoing research, collaborations, methodological challenges, and empirical work to new ideas. We are planning to publish the contributions in an international publication. 

Please send a 300-word abstract (in English or German) and a short biography (in English) to [email protected] by 5 December 2021.

Please find more information in the attached Call for Papers and on https://digilab-culture.de/call/.

We are looking forward to your contributions!

Samantha Lutz, Anna Oechslen, Hannah Rotthaus, Quoc-Tan Tran