Issue 6
Approaching the Digital Anthropocene
Edited by James Maguire, Astrid Andersen, and Rachel Douglas Jones
It is becoming increasingly difficult to address digital questions without considering how they overlap and intersect with environmental concerns. We make the digital through the appropriation of environmental forms; crafting metals and plastics into sleek handheld devices, while powering our data through vast quantities of energy. We observe and make our understandings of environments through, for example, digital devices, spreadsheet accounting and carbon calculations. We have brought epochal shifts into being through rhetoric, disciplines, and geological measures. While the Anthropocene is constituted through colonial histories, it is also, we claim, a digitally mediated and produced time that is deeply interwoven with computation, tools, and devices. Yet the ‘we’ of these statements is an unevenly distributed set of actors, whose politics is pressing. In this special issue, we bring together scholars who study the manifold interfaces between the environmental and the digital. As such, it offers a double gaze upon digital and environmental relations: examining how computational work is environmentally constituted as well as how the sensing, knowing, and contesting of environmental issues is increasingly mediated by digital processes and technologies.
The special issue contains an introduction, four research papers, and a commentary. The worlds it renders emerge through carefully attuned ethnographic sensitivities to specific locations, while offering insights that work across digital and environmental concerns. Through its double gaze, we learn about remotely sensed archaeological landscapes in Afghanistan, struggles for environmental data justice in Texas, the role of databases in the enactment of climate governance in the Caribbean, and speculative eco-tech prototypes of data gardens and forests in Copenhagen and Berlin.
The authors bring both anthropological and STS perspectives to bear upon digital modes of knowing and making environments, and upon environmental modes of constituting the digital. In situating the production of environments in digital terms, the collection opens up for a range of political questions that breach the boundaries of environmental politics and digital politics as mutually exclusive areas of enquiry.
Table of Contents
Articles
The Limits to Computational Growth Sarah E. Vaughn PDF | Pages: 1–27
New in the Blog Series
Our new series, Other Terms, Other Conditions has been launched! It brings together contributions that introduce non-English terms to disrupt established modes of theorising in so-called Western sciences. The aim of the editors, Endre Dányi, Clément Dréano and Gergely Mohácsi, is to contribute to the discussion on the political and theoretical effects of traversing between English and other languages. In the first entry, Jakkrit Sangkhamanee and Casper Bruun Jensen take the reader to Thailand where terms like curry (Kaeng; แกง) are meant to cause confusion and subversion during democratic protests.
- Roaming-with quiltros
- The Road To Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions
- Affidarsi
- Exploring languaging through an ontological register
- Performative Liveness in Doing Yolŋu Aboriginal Language.
Issue 5
Anthropology and Science Fiction: Experiments in Thinking across Worlds
Table of Contents
Experiments in Thinking across Worlds Casper Bruun Jensen and Asli Kemiksiz PDF | Pages: i–xiii
Articles
The Functions of the Embassy in the World-Making Experiments of China Miéville Steven Brown PDF | Pages: 95–116
Materials of Imagination: On the Limits and the Potentials of the Humanoid Robot Asli Kemiksiz PDF | Pages: 69–94
Revisiting a State of Nature: An Anthropological Encounter with Multispecies Science Fiction Michael Fisch PDF | Pages: 50–68
Ant Network Theory Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay and Geoffrey C. Bowker PDF | Pages: 26–49
Imagining Feminist Futures on the Small Screen: Inclusion and Care in VR Fictions Marisa Brandt and Lisa Messeri PDF | Pages: 1–25
Interviews
Reclaiming Imagination: Speculative SF as an Art of Consequences An interview with Isabelle Stengers Casper Bruun Jensen and Line Marie Thorsen PDF | HTML
Writing Science Fiction Out of Experience: SF, Social Science and Planetary Transformations An interview with Kim Stanley Robinson Aslı Kemiksiz and Casper Bruun Jensen PDF | HTML
Issue 4
Life under Influence
Table of Contents
Introduction Dominique Lestel and Perig Pitrou PDF | Pages: i–ix.
Life as a Making
Perig Pitrou
PDF | Pages: 1–37.
How Machines Force Us to Rethink What it Means to Be Living
Dominique Lestel
PDF | Pages: 38–58.
The Body with Anonymous Organs: Transformation of the Body and the Social in Organ Transplantation
Goro Yamazaki
PDF | Pages: 59–75.
Robots: Technical Individuals and Systems
Paul Dumouchel
PDF | Pages: 76–89.
Viral Life, at Last
Thierry Bardini
PDF | Pages: 90–114.