Inhabiting Media: An Anthropology of Life in Digital Speed

Duclos, Vincent

doi:10.14506/ca32.1.03

Cited by 12 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 7 publications

(3 reference statements)

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“…First, it would require anthropologists to account for time frames that are beyond human experience, such as the longer‐than‐human lifetime of environments and infrastructures or the faster‐than‐human response time of high‐frequency trading. Second, it would require us to apprehend speed as constitutive of many anthropological objects of interest, like the viral speed of epidemics in Nguyen's () essay, self‐conscious speed‐shifting as collaborative world building in Ignacio Farías's () account of participatory urban design in Munich, digital speed as overexposure but also as generative of creative uncertainty in Duclos's () reflection on what it might mean to inhabit media, and the absent immediacies of partial attention in Carlo Caduff's () fragmented experimental essay that promises an experiential “speed crash course.” Finally, as in Caduff's contribution, it would extend anthropological experiments with form such that speed as constitutive process does not, through ethnographic representation, transform into speed as static object.…”

Section: Temporality Mobility and Sovereigntymentioning

confidence: 99%

Time and Relational Possibility: Cultural Anthropology in 2017

Tamarkin

2018

American Anthropologist

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This essay reviews work produced in predominantly US cultural anthropology publications throughout 2017. It asks: What makes an anthropological inquiry timely, what sorts of relationalities command anthropological attention, and to what end? Noting our ongoing methodological commitment to long-term ethnography alongside increasingly important online forums for reaching broader publics and responding quickly to emerging issues, it expands the range of work surveyed to include some online-only short essays alongside the larger collection of traditionally published research articles. Characterized by empathic inquiry, frequently drawing on years of ethnographic and personal experience with the places, people, and other entities that we write about, and often attentive to histories at multiple scales, cultural anthropology of this moment, however published, grapples with dark times while it also offers ways of imagining other, better futures and ways of being in relation to others. Two thematic clusters organize this essay: the first considers temporality alongside mobility and sovereignty, and the second considers relationality alongside subjectivity and mediation. Together, all of these concerns-that are both of the moment and long standing-build a varied body of work that grapples with the interrelationalities that constitute power, place, and possibility. I argue that what makes an anthropological inquiry timely is the extent to which it is relationally informed and attuned to care for worlds that we inhabit and imagine, together. [year in review, sociocultural anthropology, temporality, mobility, sovereignty, relationality, subjectivity, mediation] RESUMEN Este ensayo revisa el trabajo producido en publicaciones de antropología cultural predominantemente estadounidenses durante 2017. Pregunta: ¿Qué hace la investigación antropológica oportuna, y qué tipos de relacionalidades comandan la atención antropológica, y con qué fin? Notando nuestro compromiso metodológico continuo con una etnografía de largo plazo junto a foros en línea cada vez más importantes para llegar a públicos más amplios y respondiendo rápidamente a cuestiones emergentes, expande el rango del trabajo evaluado para incluir algunos ensayos cortos sólo en línea junto a la mayor colección de artículos de investigación publicados tradicionalmente. Caracterizada por una investigación empática, frecuentemente extrayendo de años de experiencia etnográfica y personal con los lugares, la gente, y otras entidades sobre las que escribimos, y a menudo atentos a historias a escalas múltiples, la antropología cultural de este momento, independientemente de cómo sea publicada, lucha contra tiempos oscuros mientras ofrece maneras de imaginar otros, mejores futuros y formas de estar en relación con otros. Dos grupos temáticos organizan este ensayo: el primero considera temporalidad junto a movilidad y soberanía, y el segundo considera relacionalidad junto a subjetividad y mediación. Juntas, todas estas preocupaciones-que son tanto del momento como de larga d...

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Section: Temporality Mobility and Sovereigntymentioning

confidence: 99%

Time and Relational Possibility: Cultural Anthropology in 2017

Tamarkin

2018

American Anthropologist

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“…Working towards a grounded account of digital everyday experience, I suggest we might benefit from centring work that questions the intricate and complex questions of how subjectivity becomes digitally mediated. In this case, we must move beyond the narrative of an uncritical celebration of seamless connectivity or speed that we find in Western geographic accounts of digital experience (Duclos, 2017). Instead, we must work to situate the specificities of everyday digital practices (Rose et al, 2020, 2017).…”

Section: Towards Everyday Smartphone Geographies: Living (Digitally) ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Living digitally like a migrant: Everyday smartphone practices and the (Re)mediation of hostile state-affects

Morgan

2023

Progress in Human Geography

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Over the last decade, geographical research has documented how digital technologies are changing experiences of (im)mobility into and within Europe. For irregular migrants in the European context, the smartphone has become a vital digital tool for mediating everyday experiences of hostile environments that have become characteristic of mobility landscapes. Building upon novel work in Social Media and Media studies, which explores the entanglements between smartphones and mobility, this paper aims to bring forward a geographical research agenda that centres everyday smartphone practices as a central object of inquiry in work on irregular migration and broader work around everyday life: specifically in the context in which hostility has become one of the main affective experiences of mobility governance throughout Western Europe. Introducing the concept of living (digitally) like a migrant, this paper highlights how we can no longer conceptualise irregular ‘migrant life’ without consideration of the way in which life, in a biopolitical sense, is productive of and enmeshed within, everyday digital practices. This paper thus offers an agenda for geographic research concerned with forms of the everyday: demanding we can no longer conceptualise the everyday, nor experiences of irregular migration, without serious consideration of the digital – specifically of everyday smartphone practices. We must, therefore, take seriously the forms of digital agency or experience that (re)mediate encounters with state-administered hostility, whilst remaining open to the affirmative forms of living or flourishing that may emerge through everyday engagement with the digital.

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“…) or experimenting with controverted and case‐specific social and material arrangements—e.g., health care markets, modes of service provision, and technologies—to explore how to lead a better life or have a better death, trying to discover the good in practice. Others have suggested that digital self‐care technologies might not so much aim at enhancing human autonomy but might, in fact, decenter it through forms of delegation and relief (Duclos ; Hunt et al. ; Schüll ).…”

Section: Below the Human Propermentioning

confidence: 99%

Care in Trouble: Ecologies of Support from Below and Beyond

Duclos

Criado

2019

Med Anthropol Q

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Over the last decades, care has proliferated as a notion aimed at capturing a vast array of practices, conditions, and sentiments. In this article, we argue that the analytics of care may benefit from being troubled, as it too often reduces the reproduction of life to matters of palliation and repair, fueling a politics of nationalism and identitarianism. Picking up the threads of insight from STS, “new materialisms,” and postcolonial feminist and indigenous scholarship, we discuss care from “below” and “beyond,” thus exposing tensions between the enveloping and the diverging, the enduring and the engendering, that play out in care practices. We propose “ecologies of support” as an analytic that attends to how humans are grounded in, traversed by, and undermined by more‐than‐human and often opaque, speculative, subterranean elements. Our proposal is for anthropology to not simply map life‐sustaining ecologies, but to experimentally engage with troubling modes of inquiry and intervention.

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Inhabiting Media: An Anthropology of Life in Digital Speed

Cited by 12 publications

References 7 publications

Time and Relational Possibility: Cultural Anthropology in 2017

Time and Relational Possibility: Cultural Anthropology in 2017

Living digitally like a migrant: Everyday smartphone practices and the (Re)mediation of hostile state-affects

Care in Trouble: Ecologies of Support from Below and Beyond

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