Geomedia 2023

Ridell, S. (Puheenjohtaja)
Rautiainen-Keskustalo, T. (Puheenjohtaja)

Viestintätieteet

Aktiviteetti: Workshopin tai sessionin puheenjohtajana toimiminen

Description

Panel 9: Material entanglements of nonanthropocentric hope

Aikajakso	21 syysk. 2023
Tapahtuman tyyppi	Conference
Sijainti	Tampere, SuomiNäytä kartalla
Tunnustuksen arvo	International

Country of activity

Suomi

Nature of activity

Tutkimuksellinen

Asiakirjat ja linkit

Digital mediation of environments tends to aspire toward a logic that overlooks the scope and depth of our material involvement with and dependence on the world around us, fostering hope of limitless pursuit of human desires. This position has proven fatally untenable by the accelerating climate crisis and increasingly all‐encompassing environmental disasters. The panel addresses the asymmetrical relationships between human and nonhuman in terms of ubiquitous computing and digitally mediated infrastructures, proposing a redefinition of hope through complex human–nonhuman material entanglements. As an inspirational background, we point to Bruno Latour’s idea of a terrestrial paradigm, which urges us to understand how the current crises descend from the fact that the Earth has stopped meekly absorbing human aggression and is now striking back. The urgency of the situation for any scholarly discipline comes from the fact that the dimensions of the process are much larger and more profound than we even can imagine, and the prevailing scientific paradigms have few tools to grasp it. The panel will focus on the increasingly digitally mediated infrastructures through challenging the human‐centered techno‐scientific and ultra‐rational agenda that often underpins the envisioning, planning and deployment of infrastructures. By theorizing and analyzing infrastructures and infrastructural imaginaries ‘against the grain’, we aim to figure out ways to promote materially entangled structures of hope that are allowed to all terrestrial inhabitants.