GeoDiskurse in cooperation with: Transient Spaces Lecture Series. Lecture is on 13th June 2024,10:15 until 11:45 at Hörsaal 5, University of Innsbruck. Title: Urban public spaces as catalysts for empowerment and social inclusion. By Hooshmand Alizadeh.

Negotiating digital lives

Thinking about digital lives involves grappling with every-where and every-when entangled lived experiences and relations, as humans and more-than-humans morph in relation to the digital, in a mixture of mundane and spectacular ways. While some theorists have extended the term ‘more-than-human’ to include digital entities such as data, this talk offers a different stance to recentre how particular humans, and human institutions, are highly agential with respect to the digital, and that responsibility for their impacts, both negative and positive, cannot be eschewed. Diminishing of institutional and corporate responsibility for digital lives tends to be growing, as reflected in recent declarations of pending human extinction from/by AI.

Rather than perpetuating obfuscation of such responsibility and agency with respect to the digital, there are valuable opportunities to reset our digital lives, to take better care of human and more-than-human presences and futures that centre equity and sustainability. Drawing on the work of Tomás Saraceno’s Web(s) of Life, an eco-social energy transition project that foregrounds extractive digital lives of the Global North and the impact of these on the Global South, this talk offers a way to think about refusal of digital damages and instead resituates multi-scale responsibility for different futures. I also share insights from a non-digital research project where Indigenous knowledges and Country lead learning.

Heidelberg University, Berliner Str. 48, Lecture Room (Hörsaal)

15th December 2026, 16:15 – 17:45

Poster of Richardson’s lecture:

Speaker

Asst. Prof. Dr. Eugene Richardson

Harvard University, USA

Dr. Richardson’s work centers on the complex webs of health inequities, racial capitalism, and climate change by critically examining how structural forces and symbolic power permeate and configure socio-ecological systems. Methodologically, he integrates diverse disciplines—including political ecology, epidemiology, anthropology, science and technology studies, and complexity theory—to explore the discursive, material, and socio-historical dimensions of human-environment relations.

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