Eurograd message

                Dear colleagues,

We would like to invite you to submit an abstract for our special issue 
on “Digital Transformations and Climate Change: Futures, 
Infrastructures, and Data”. This issue aims to investigate how digital 
processes and climate change interact with and influence each other. To 
achieve this, we invite contributions for an open-access issue in 
theKulturanthropologie Notizen  (peer-reviewed + 
OA). We encourage submissions that adopt a cultural anthropological and 
STS perspective, underpinned by ethnographic insights that scrutinize 
futures, infrastructures, and data. Multimodal approaches to the topic 
are welcome.

Abstracts with a length of 300 words can be submitted to Dennis Eckhardt 
(dennis.eckhardt@fau.de) and Kathrin Eitel (kathrin.eitel@uzh.ch) *by 
May 15, 2024*.

We would be pleased if you could forward this call to interested persons!

Best wishes,

Dennis Eckhardt and Kathrin Eitel

****
Digital Transformations and Climate Change: Futures, Infrastructures and 
Data

Advancing digitalization and climate change are two topics that have 
increasingly attracted the attention of cultural anthropologists, STS 
researchers, sociologists, and human geographers in recent years. Both 
the modelling of climate developments and the adaptation of household 
appliances to the environment as well as the design of smart resilient 
cities are examples of the closely interlinked areas of digital 
predictions, visualizations, and applications in the context of climate 
change, digitalization, and environmental disasters.
Research has progressively engaged with the complex relationship between 
digitalization and knowledge. This includes identifying knowledge 
production as inherently socially and affectively embedded (Bruun et 
al., 2022), and emphasizing the performative and procedural character of 
(environmental) technology and knowledge. Drawing from feminist 
technoscience studies that used to explore the interplay among 
environment, technology, and gender, scholarly work has scrutinized 
these interactions through a critical lens focused on issues of gender 
inequality, power structures, and poststructuralist critiques since the 
70s (cf. Bray 2013). The discourse on "technology" that once captivated 
the public's imagination with visions of the future continues to be a 
critical focus of academic inquiry. However, the enthusiasm and critical 
examination that accompanied the advent of technology and environmental 
discussions have not been mirrored in the exploration of digital 
transformation. Despite the apparent overlap between socio-ecological 
systems and digital advancements, only recently studies started focusing 
on the linkage of digitalization and environmental issues. There remains 
a notable gap in research that integrates digitalization with 
environmental concerns, including climate change.

Therefore, we aim to focus on the interlinking of digital and 
environmental issues, such as those produced by climate change. Both 
phenomena influence each other: from the collection of geodata to the 
hope of technological fixes through artificial intelligence. 
Digitalization, as a process of transformation, along with digitization 
that converts nearly everything into calculable digital information, are 
permeating everyday life, bodies, and subjects, perpetuating existing 
inequalities and specific technological futures (Sareen and Müller, 
2023). We build upon research that investigates "smart forests" (Gabrys, 
2020), climate technologies (Pasek, Vaughan, and Starosielski, 2023), 
cybersecurity and sustainability (Koksch and Sørensen 2023), data 
environments (Lippert, 2015) and futures (Abram et al. 2023), 
understanding digital transformations and climate change as inextricably 
intertwined. These studies enact and strengthen various notions not only 
of what is understood as climate change but also of the strategies that 
are its consequences. For example, Jennifer Gabrys (2017) views the 
environment as an experiment that is determined by how sensor 
technologies enact these. In this way, data technologies intervene in 
reality, creating distinct realities and making the environment 
calculable. Sensor technologies become naturalized as they integrate 
into the invisibilities of our everyday life. Moreover, we aim to foster 
an understanding of how new digital-environmental technologies 
infrastructure daily life and how environmental information systems 
function as tools of power (Fortun, 2004).

We aim to delve into how digital processes and climate change interact 
with and influence each other. To achieve this, we invite contributions 
for an open-access issue in the Kulturanthropologie Notizen 
(peer-reviewed + OA). We encourage submissions 
that adopt a cultural anthropological and STS perspective, underpinned 
by ethnographic insights that scrutinize futures, infrastructures, and 
data. Multimodal approaches to the topic are also welcome. We expect 
contributions that address the following questions, as well as other 
topics and issues beyond these:

  * To what extent does digitalization coin and influence how we
    perceive the environment, climate and our planetary future? How is
    this played out in daily practices?
  * How do new infrastructures resulting from the digitalization of the
    environment impact or perpetuate social inequality?
  * How do environmental information regimes exert power through new
    digital tools? Who has access to these technologies, and how are
    they utilized?
  * To what extent does digitalization influence not only how the
    environment and the future are understood, but also adjacent fields,
    for example, the financialization and the risk assessment of the
    environmental crisis?
  * How are the interlinkages between climate change and digitalization
    evoked through daily practices?
  * What can we learn from our field participants about the
    entanglements between smartness and climate change?

Abstracts with a length of 300 words can be submitted to Dennis Eckhardt 
(dennis.eckhardt@fau.de) and Kathrin Eitel (kathrin.eitel@uzh.ch) by May 
15, 2024.


Literature:
Abram, Simone,  Karen Waltorp,  Nathalie Ortar and Sarah Pink (2023): 
Energy Futures. Anthropocene Challenges, Emerging Technologies and 
Everyday Life. Berlin u. a.: De Gruyter.
Bray, Francesca (2013): Gender and Technology. In: Neelam Kumar (Hg.), 
Gender and Science. Studies across Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press, 37–60.
Bruun, Maja Hojer,  Ayo Wahlberg,  Rachel Douglas-Jones,  Cathrine 
Hasse,  Klaus Hoeyer,  Dorthe Brogård Kristensen and Brit Ross Wintereik 
(Hg.) (2022): The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology. 
Singapore: Springer Singapore Pte. Limited.
Fortun, Kim (2004): From Bhopal to the Informating of Environmentalism: 
Risk Communication in Historical Perspective. In: Osiris 19, 283–296.
Gabrys, Jennifer (2020). Smart Forests and Data Practices: From the 
Internet of Trees to Planetary Governance. In: Big Data & Society 
7(1):2053951720904871. doi: 10.1177/2053951720904871.
Kocksch, Laura and Estrid Sørensen (2023). Investigating the 
Sustainability-Cybersecurity Nexus in HCI as a Practical Problem: 
Submission to Workshop WS27: HCI for Climate Change: Imagining 
Sustainable Futures. Bochum: Ruhr-Universität Bochum. 
https://d-nb.info/1296812146/34.
Lippert, Ingmar (2015). Environment as Datascape: Enacting Emission 
Realities in Corporate Carbon Accounting. In: Geoforum 66:126–35. doi: 
10.1016/j.geoforum.2014.09.009.
Pasek, Anne, Hunter Vaughan, and Nicole Starosielski (2023). The World 
Wide Web of Carbon: Toward a Relational Footprinting of Information and 
Communications Technology’s Climate Impacts. In: Big Data & Society 
10(1):20539517231158994. doi: 10.1177/20539517231158994.
Sareen, Siddharth and Katja Müller(2023): Digitisation and Low-Carbon 
Energy Transitions. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16708-9.

-- 

Dr. Kathrin Eitel (she/her)
Walter Benjamin Fellow (DFG)