Digital devices are everywhere, shaping, ordering and changing everyday lives and social relations in ways we struggle to fully understand. From social media apps to remote sensing, from political mobilization to AGI, the speed and depth of digital entanglements challenge distinctions between what is true and what is fake, and between the private and the public, with implications for democracy, identity, and belonging.
Digital imagery blurs distance and proximity; rendering remote seascapes and landscapes legible to both environmental authorities and investors. GPS tracking and automated sensors facilitate everyday surveillance of both fellow humans and non-human species, with implications for care practices, privacy, and husbandry relations.
This conference, which marks the end of the UiO based research project ‘Private Lives’ is dedicated to contributing to an ethnographic understanding of the predicaments of the digital era with specific attention to everyday lives in digitalized worlds. Investigating digital sociality across a broad set of lived experiences and everyday applications, we seek to enhance critical reflection and a shared understanding of digital challenges and dilemmas in the Nordic region and beyond.
The conference includes keynote lectures, panels and an exhibit on Digital Sociality. A detailed program will soon be available.
You can find the video recordings from the conference here:
Wednesday 25th
Thursday 26th
Friday 27th
Keynote speakers:
Professor Hannah Knox, University College London: Climate Change, Algorithms and Governance of Matter. See abstract.
Dr. Anna-Maria Walter, University of Oulu: Between Nostalgia and Projection - Is there a Digital Present? See abstract
Associate Professor Cathrine Thorleifsson, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo: Mimetic Fascism: On belonging and inspirational violence in the age of virality. See abstract
Program at a glance:
The venue for the keynotes and panels are "Auditoriet" at the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology. Find more information about the venue at the museums website here: Lokaler - Norsk Teknisk Museum.
Wednesday October 25th
08:30 Coffee and Registration
09:00 Welcome and Keynote by Professor Hannah Knox: Climate Change, Algorithms and Governance of Matter. University College London
10:30 Panel Session 1: Bodies in Digitalized Worlds (Convenor: Tuva B. Broch, Norwegian Institute for Nature Research)
12.30 Lunch, book display and video screening at the Mezzanine
13:30 Panel Session 2: Power and Politics in Digitalized Environments (Convenor: Cecilia Salinas, University of Oslo, Discussant: Sharam Alghasi, Kristiania University College)
15:30 - 16.30 Guided tour at the exhibition Private Lives (I/0)
16:30 End of program, day 1
17:00-20:00 Meet and Greet at Kulturhuset Youngs gate 6. We have reserved tables in ‘Drivhuset’. Drinks and food at your own cost. (Read more about Kulturhuset at their own website here: Kulturhuset i Oslo)
Thursday October 26th
08:30 Coffee
09:00 Keynote by Dr. Anna-Maria Walter: Between Nostalgia and Projection - Is There a Digital Present?, University of Oulu
10:30 Panel Session 3, part I: Inscribing Nature in Digital Worlds (Convenors: Marianne E. Lien and Tom Bratrud, University of Oslo)
12.30 Lunch, book display and video screening at the Mezzanine
13:30 Panel Session 3, part II: Inscribing Nature in Digital Worlds (Convenors: Marianne E. Lien and Tom Bratrud, University of Oslo)
15:30 - 16.30 Guided tour at the exhibition Private Lives (I/0)
16:30 End of program, day 2
19:15 Conference Dinner at Zarathustra (by invitation)
Friday October 27th
08:30 Coffee
09:00 Keynote by Cathrine Thorleifsson: Mimetic Fascism: On belonging and inspirational violence in the age of virality, University of Oslo
10:30 Panel Session 4: Friends or Foes? Digital Platforms in our Everyday Lives (Convenors: Lene Pettersen and Plata Diesen, Kristiania University College)
12:30 Lunch, book display and video screening at the Mezzanine
13:30 Panel Session 5: Consumption and Friction on Digital Platforms (Convenors: Clara Julia Reich and Mikko Laamanen, Consumption Research Norway)
15:30 - 16.30 Guided tour at the exhibition Private Lives (I/0)
16:30 End of program, day 3
How to register:
The conference is open for all, and there is no conference fee. Lunch and coffee/tea will only be available for registered participants. Registered participants will also enjoy free admission to the NTM exhibit I/O, and the Private Lives exhibit DIGSOS I/0.
Registration is now closed.
Panels:
The final program for panels and abstracts is now ready, and you can find it here: Panels and abstracts - final program (PDF)
Panel 1: Bodies in digitalized worlds
Convenor: Tuva B. Broch
The word digital derives from Latin for finger, making the body a central, yet underexplored, part of our current era. The digital relies heavily on vision, although recently touch has become an area of investment. Howes (2003) argues that the hegemony of vision in Western culture undermines understanding of the interplay of our multiple senses – In the anthropology of senses, it could be argued that the mind is often silenced.
As online and offline worlds are entangled, so are our senses, body, and mind. In other words, that most people today live in digital environments, where the digital has become naturalized – still leaves room for different bodily experiences connected to the analogue and digital. Thus, this panel seeks to explore what happens to bodies and senses as humans around the world partake, consciously and/or unconsciously in digital practices in their everyday life. We ask how living in a digital era both challenges and actualizes our bodies and senses.
Panel 2: Power and politics in digitalized environments
Convenor: Cecilia Salinas
An emergent body of anthropological work is contesting totalising narratives about what digital technologies and the internet mean for societies. People do not adopt digital tools passively but perform effective and creative politics in myriad ways. As online and offline worlds are increasingly intertwined, the new complex way of interactions demands knowledge of the multiple ways in which people engage with digital technologies.
This panel invites contributions that discuss the specific ways in which people engage with digital platforms and tools politically. As such, this panel aims to explore how digital technologies are incorporated into people’s everyday attempts to disrupt, demand, resist, navigate and challenge the status quo in political spaces and within relationships of power.
Panel 3: Inscribing nature in digital worlds
Convenors: Marianne E. Lien and Tom Bratrud
Digital technology is currently mediating biosocial relations in various ways: GPS tracking, smartphones, satellite photos and digital tagging is being incorporated in farming and herding practices; promising enhanced remote animal control as well as precision agriculture. At the same time, close encounters with ‘untouched’ nature (and wild animals) is ritually celebrated through the digital sharing of mountain-top-selfies on Social Media with implications for identity-work and regional tourism.
This panel invites contributions that approach the ways in which natural environments are mediated, managed, interpreted and curated through digital technologies. How do digitized technologies shape relations human relations with the other-than-human world? What modes of knowing, forms of governance, and affective encounters do digitalized contact zones enable? We especially invite contributions with an ethnographic approach.
Panel 4: Friends or foes? Digital Platforms in our Everyday Lives
Convenors: Lene Pettersen and Plata Diesen
Smartphones, digital applications and digital platforms play a key role in our everyday lives in a variety of ways. Yet, we need a better, and holistic, understanding of how people, human communities and societies interact and are shaped by technologies.
This panel welcomes interdisciplinary contributions as the field of digital anthropology is shaped by conversations across a range of disciplines including communication, design, informatics, media studies, sociology, as well as human-machine, internet studies, and science and technology studies. We call for abstracts on a wide set of topics that concern users, communities and other aspects related to how the digital interferes with our everyday lives, including but limited to: dating-, sports-, games-, social media-, and music- applications, as well as strategies users develop to tackle or cope with different aspects of digital applications and platforms (e.g. digital detox, logging off, etc.). We especially welcome ethnographic methods researching the digital.
Panel 5: Consumption and Friction on Digital Platforms
Convenors: Clara Julia Reich and Henry Mainsah
With the rise of platforms and the platform economy, new questions regarding interactions in everyday life emerge. Considering the variety and unique features of digital platforms spanning from social media to gaming to service provision platforms, there is a need to understand the particularities and relations with user practices. Frictions, negotiation, and boundary-making processes can be a fruitful way to gain insights into users' digital practices on and in their encounters with the platforms. Such processes might reveal heterogenous, unequal encounters, and points of contestation that slow or accelerate operations of power.
Drawing on various disciplines, this panel invites contributions that explore the frictions that occur between users and digital platforms. This includes the frictions occur among users as well as in the engagement with the platform. The panel draws upon the role of users as consumers, as well as the role consumption and the material play in interactions with the platforms.