Neolithic menhir (standing stone) at Glencolumbkille, Co. Donegal, Ireland. Photo by Andreas Brunn on Unsplash
In my last blog post, I wrote about some concepts that are driving my latest ideas about futures-thinking methods. In the next few posts, I’ll build on this to discuss some further inspirations for developing these methods. This blog post considers how different disciplines can come together to develop powerful futures-thinking research methods, drawing on modern archaeology and history as an inspiration.
I have been fascinated by history all my life and remain a keen reader/podcast listener of history from all periods, including prehistory. From this, I am learning that contemporary historical and archaeological research is expanding into intriguing interdisciplinary collaborations with scientists. Archaeologists have always employed sophisticated scientific methods for dating material culture artefacts and organic remains from humans and other living things together with the geographical and geological contexts in which they are found. Radiocarbon dating is one example that has been in use since the 1940s.
Now developments in techniques for analysing ancient DNA are offering new insights: for example, into the migration patterns of human species globally or how climate change over millennia has had an impact on humans. Advances in site excavation science such as Ground-Penetrating Radar and Light Detection and Ranging technologies allow for non-invasive investigations to help discover and map the locations of artefacts, ancient buildings and other structural ruins, burial sites and the like. Scientific data from these investigations are combined with analysis of written, arts-based and other textual artefacts, existing historical accounts and the insights offered by biological and cultural anthropology to generate new knowledge about the biological makeup and cultures of humans across eras since prehistoric times.
As archaeologist Davide Zorie puts it in his recent book about Viking history, bringing together techniques from humanities and social sciences with scientific methods advances archaeological research in the following ways. It can confirm findings from across datasets, identify contradictions that need examining or resolving, and complement findings, thereby mutually enriching the narratives told from each set of data/technique alone.
How do these techniques relate to interdisciplinary futures-thinking? Well, if we want to really push the boundaries in future-thinking methods, contemporary archaeology and history techniques offer a wonderful example. Researchers who use data-driven modelling and forecasting techniques, for example, typically pull in information from many different sources – but not often from the humanities or the more qualitative and interpretive side of social inquiry. Those who are interested in going beyond a human-centric focus in generating ideas for more-than-human futures can consider how insights from archaeology, history and the natural sciences can be incorporated into these imaginaries. Researchers engaging in speculative thinking who use approaches from the humanities could consider how AI techniques can be used as part of futures world-building.
One example I came across recently is the DATALAND digital art installations led by the Refik Anadol Studio. The studio uses what they call ‘the Large Nature Model’, an open source generative AI model that is trained on datasets about the natural world derived from the internet as well as from museums, universities and other research archives. These datasets combine nature-related sounds, images, scents, textures and climates measures to create a dynamic platform – a ‘living archive’ – of interactions between ecosystems as a form of multi-sensory storytelling.
The possibilities for creative future-thinking techniques and applications are endless, really …
Throughout the COVID pandemic, I have been an advocate for ensuring the events held by universities, including conferences, seminars and talks open to the general public, are safe and accessible. I have repeatedly called for events organisers and venue managers to do their best to make events COVID safe (mostly using Twitter/X to do so, but also sending emails to organisers).
As I wrote in a piece for Croakey this week, misinformation and lack of visibility about the continuing risks posed by COVID is rife across all sectors of life. As a consequence, fewer people are realising just how serious the risks are, even while new viral subvariants continue to emerge and medical research on the impacts of even ‘mild’ COVID infection (long COVID) is continually being published (see, for example, a recent editorial in the British Medical Journal ).
In addition to providing education on long COVID to the biomedical community, we need a public communications campaign that informs the public about the risks and outcomes of long COVID.
In the absence of government-run campaigns, have been doing my best to engage in public communication about COVID risk – including to my academic colleagues. Three months ago, I published a set of guidelines on this blog to help organisers ensure that their events would not become super-spreader occasions. These guidelines offer opportunities for event organisers to expand access and improve inclusion not only for people who want to avoid COVID infection but also those who are disabled, are carers, have little travel funding or live in countries where visas for travel to conferences are denied, or who want to reduce their carbon footprint.
Advocating for COVID safe and otherwise more accessible academic events is proving an ever more serious challenge in an information environment (even at universities) in which it seems to assumed that the worst of the pandemic is over and many protections for event attendees have either been dropped or are not adhered to. For example, ‘strong recommendations’ for people to wear masks to protect themselves and each other seem to be little observed.
Over the past year, I had seen many reports of academic events offering no online options for participation. I had heard of many conferences where people had tested COVID positive while attending or soon after returning home. But what is happening at the writers’ conference being held at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf campus in Vermont, USA, really alarms me. Reports have come through on Twitter/X about over 10% of attendees reporting COVID infections. Those infected are reporting that they have been given little support by the event organisers, have been sent home while ill and infected, and that the rest of the conference was continuing with few mitigations in place to protect those still on site.
I made it home frm “the mountain” somehow propelling myself home on a 6hr drive in a fugue state. I am so very, very sick. So much water and advil and rest and still, can hardly drag myself out of bed to pee. If I get long covid I’m going to be SO pissed. https://t.co/wIiQCnc5CI
Bread Loaf has sent its covid+ workshoppers home w/o regard to increasing viral transmission unlike @LambdaLiterary, @sewaneewriters & @Tin_House, each of which had robust covid protocols. it’s clear which conferences prioritize community safety & which are just a cash grab. https://t.co/Dnj9CxGJt2
Is this the future of academic conferences? Little care taken to protect attendees, covering over the harsh realities of what has happened to those who were infected, expecting people to leave immediately, even when they are very ill and pose a risk to anyone they may come into contact while travelling home?
It seems it is time to redouble my efforts to draw attention to these issues. We need to #MakeConferencesCOVIDSafe. The lives and health of academics and other knowledge workers (such as these talented writers) – across the age span and seniority levels – should not be placed in further jeopardy.
This book has now been published. It is available from the Polity website here. A video of me giving a talk about the book is here.
Here is the list of contents:
Introduction
1 Conceptualizing Humans, Animals and Human–Animal Relations
2 Animal Enthusiasts, Activism and Politics in Digital Media
3 The Quantified Animal and Dataveillance
4 Animal Cuteness, Therapy and Celebrity Online
5 Animal Avatars and Zoomorphic Robots
Conclusion: Reimagining Human–Animal Relations
Below is an excerpt from the Introduction chapter, explaining the main themes and issues discussed in the book:
The Internet of Animals is the first book to bring together perspectives from across the humanities and social sciences to consider how digital technologies are contributing to human-animal relationships at both the micropolitical and macropolitical levels. It builds on and extends a growing interest in social and cultural inquiry in: i) the digitization and datafication of humans and other animals with and through new digital media and ‘smart’ devices; ii) the affective and embodied relationships between humans and other animals; iii) the health and environmental crises in which human health and wellbeing are inextricably entangled with other animals and living creatures; and iv) more-than-human theoretical perspectives. The book delves into the ways that animals across a range of species and in a multitude of spaces are represented and incorporated into various forms of digital technologies, and the consequences for how we think and feel about as well as relate to and treat other animals.
Across the book’s chapters, the broader socioeconomic, cultural, biological and geographical contexts in which these technological interventions have emerged and are implemented are carefully considered. Many animal species are becoming threatened by catastrophic changes to their habitats and lives caused by humans, such as ecological degradation and pollution; climate change, global warming and extreme weather events; and the clearing of forests to make way for industries or the expansion of cities. Animals’ health and wellbeing have been severely undermined by these human-wrought crises, including exacerbating their exposure to disease, depriving them of their usual food sources, disrupting breeding cycles, accelerating species extinction and contributing to biodiversity loss. Industries devoted to the mass production of digital technologies (mobile and other computing devices, Wi Fi devices and digital data storage facilities) and to energy generation to power these technologies, together with the accumulation of non-degradable ‘e-waste’ from discard devices and contribution to landfill toxins, make a massive contribution to these detrimental effects on planetary health. Digital media play a major role in drawing publics’ attention to cases of animal mistreatment and cruelty, but also contribute to the objectification of animals and the vilification of species deemed to be threats to human welfare or the economy, requiring tight containment or extermination.
… Throughout the book I analyse the content and use of these devices, software and media from a sociocultural perspective, identifying implications for human-animal relationships and for generating ideas about future developments for digital technologies that have the potential to contribute to both human and nonhuman animal flourishing across the world. I argue that the ways in which animals are portrayed, monitored and cared for by humans using digital media and devices have significant implications for how humans and animals will live together in the near future: including human and animal health and wellbeing, environmental sustainability and activism, and industries related to digital technology development, animal care, animal protection, food production and consumption as well as smart farming, smart homes and smart cities.
… a series of questions are addressed, as follows: How are human-animal relationships changing, and how are digital media and devices contributing to this change? What do humans and other animals lose and gain when animals are digitized and datafied? What are the implications of a more-than-human approach for ethical and caring relationships between humans and other animal species? What are the implications for both human and animal health and wellbeing – and at a larger scale, for planetary health?
In addressing these questions, I engage with the expanding body of more-than-human theory that focuses on the embodied and multisensory dimensions of people’s encounters with digital technologies and digital data, and the affective forces and capacities that are generated with and through these relationships. My approach to digitization and datafication recognises that digital technologies and digital data are vibrant agents in the lives of humans and animals, configuring animal-human-digital assemblages that are constantly changing as technologies come together with humans and animals in place, space and time.
… Chapter 1 introduces the foundational concepts and theoretical perspectives on human-animals relations offered from relevant scholarship across the humanities and social sciences and discusses how they contribute to the key issues and themes discussed in the book. The next four chapters focus on specific ways in which animals are portrayed in digital media and monitored with the use of ‘smart’ technologies. Chapter 2 addresses the topic of animal activism and other political issues concerning humans’ treatment of and relationships with animals, including contestation and conflicts between actors in this online space. In Chapter 3, the plethora of rationales, imaginaries and practices configuring the dataveillance of animals are examined: including those devices designed for caring for pets or protection of wildlife as well as technologies incorporated into ‘smart farming’ initiatives. Chapter 4 focuses on the affective dimensions of cuteness and celebrity as they are expressed in relation to animals in digital media, as well as the positioning of animals as therapeutic objects. The representation of animals in computer games and zoomorphic robots are the subject of Chapter 5. While these digital technologies may seem quite distinct from each other, the strong influence of Japanese culture is evident in both modes for digitizing animals. The brief conclusion chapter summarise the main points made in the book and provokes thinking about the futures of the Internet of Animals, with a particular focus on the use of digital technologies in arts-based initiatives that seek to attune humans to their role as merely one animal species in complex multispecies ecosystems.
The third in my series of books about the social aspects of COVID-19 is out today. COVID Societies: Theorising the Coronavirus Crisis can be ordered from Routledge here and a preview of its contents can be viewed at Google Books here. The abstracts for each chapter are listed below.
INTRODUCTION: COVID societies
The COVID-19 crisis has provoked intense and far-reaching socioeconomic changes globally as well as posing a major threat to human health and wellbeing. This introductory chapter introduces the rationale for the book, addressing the question of why sociocultural theories and historical perspectives are so important to make sense of how the COVID catastrophe erupted and created so much turmoil worldwide. The chapter also provides an outline of the content of the remainder of the book, detailing the topics and theoretical perspectives on which each of the ensuing chapters focus. These include discussions of the political economy perspective; biopolitics; risk society and cultures; gender and queer theory; and more-than-human theory.
1 COVID IN CONTEXT: Histories and narratives of health, risk and contagion
Major new or recurring infectious disease outbreaks are always accompanied by significant sociocultural and political disruptions and transformations. These crises often call into question ways of viewing and living in the world, as well as exposing and entrenching forms of social discrimination and inequalities. This chapter provides an overview of the historical, sociocultural and political contexts of the COVID-19 crisis. Medical historians, sociologists, anthropologists and cultural geographers have shown that social, cultural and political responses to the emergence or return of deadly pathogens often bring to the surface hidden, unacknowledged or long-established beliefs and practices. The chapter demonstrates how these perspectives have offered much of value in relation to the analysis of the sociocultural and political dimensions of previous serious infectious diseases. This discussion is followed by an account of how the new virus SARS-CoV-2 and the new disease COVID-19 emerged in the early months of 2020 and developments in the pandemic throughout 2020 and into 2021.
2 THE MACROPOLITICS OF COVID: A political economy perspective
Political economy critiques adopt a macropolitical perspective, drawing on Marxist theory as well as feminist critiques, critical disability studies, critical race theory and postcolonial theory to highlight the social determinants of health and healthcare and the role played by medical expertise and authority in society. A political economy perspective incorporates the discussion of social justice issues, inequalities and the exacerbation of socioeconomic disadvantage caused by the pandemic, including the disproportionate effects on low-income countries and marginalised social groups. Indeed, some commentators have argued that the COVID-19 pandemic has surfaced a ‘crisis of care’, in which the failings of neoliberal political and privatised approaches to public health surveillance systems and healthcare delivery across the world have been shockingly revealed. This chapter shows how neoliberal and free market capitalist political systems have been called to account and disrupted by the COVID crisis but have also operated to protect the privileged and further entrench inequalities in COVID societies. The concepts of medical dominance, the social determinants of health and globalisation are explained and applied to the COVID crisis.
3 THE BIOPOLITICS OF COVID: Foucauldian approaches
COVID-19 governance at the level of the state raises questions about how power is exerted and experienced and how it may be productive as well as repressive. This chapter delves more deeply into the complexities of these tensions and conflicts, using perspectives drawn from the scholarship of the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault to trace the historical underpinnings of contemporary approaches and responses to the COVID crisis. Various levels of control over citizens’ bodies and movements have been exerted and rationales for limiting individual freedoms put forward to protect the health of the body politic. Foucauldian theory offers concepts for understanding these relations of power. The scholarship of philosophers Giorgio Agamben and his concepts of bare life and states of exception, Roberto Esposito and his notions of affirmative biopolitics and immunitary mechanisms, and Achille Mbembe and his writings on necropolitics is also outlined. This discussion is followed by an account of Foucauldian viewpoints on the biopolitical dimensions of COVID societies have been developed, including discussion of how these theorists analysed social and governmental responses to the crisis.
4 RISK AND COVID: Risk society and risk cultures
The COVID-19 crisis is suffused with discourses, practices and emotions related to people’s reactions to risk and uncertainty. This chapter focuses on sociologist Ulrich Beck’s risk society perspective and anthropologist Mary Douglas’ cultural/symbolic approach to risk. Concepts from Beck’s scholarship, including reflexive modernisation, individualisation and cosmopolitanism, and Douglas’ work on the cultures of risk, blame and symbolic boundary control are explained and applied in an analysis of risk and uncertainty in COVID societies. The chapter shows that the risk discourses and practices circulating within and between regions and countries globally involve an affectively compelling combination of concepts of embodiment, contagion, danger and morality. The COVID crisis can be considered both a pre-industrial, fateful event and a late modern risk society phenomenon.
5 QUEERING COVID: Insights from gender and queer theory
This chapter introduces insights from scholarship in gender and queer theory and shows how they can be productively applied to an analysis of embodiment and socialities in COVID-19 times. While contemporary queer theory has its roots in critical studies of gender and sexuality, it has since expanded well beyond these origins. There are many intersections and overlaps between gender and queer theory, and both reach into many related fields: including queer necropolitics, queer death studies, crip studies, fat studies and critical animal studies. The major precepts of these intertwined bodies of literature are explained, with reference to the influential scholarship of philosophers such as Mel Chen, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Julia Kristeva. These extensions of gender and queer theory and what they offer for analysis of the COVID crisis are considered in this chapter. They critically analyse aspects of discourse, affect and embodiment to ‘queer the pandemic’: that is, to highlight disjunctures and invisibilities in the ways with which COVID has been portrayed and dealt and to provide further insights into the nature of lived experience in COVID societies. In identifying how these responses might be subject to contestation and change, contributors to gender and queer theory scholarship imagine better and more inclusive futures.
Given the intertwined dimensions of human and nonhuman relations and connections, the crushing impact of the COVID-19 crisis extends well beyond human lives and agencies. Scholars and researchers are beginning to engage with the body of scholarship that I refer to as ‘more-than-human theory’ (alternative terms used are ‘new materialisms’ or ‘the critical posthumanities’). There are various varieties of more-than-human theory. In the discussion presented here, I focus specifically on the scholarship that builds on non-western cosmologies (particularly Indigenous and First Nations philosophies) and the feminist materialism perspectives offered by western philosophers Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad and Jane Bennett. These philosophies advance a non-anthropocentric approach to understanding human existence. The implications of this approach for understanding the complexities and dynamism of COVID societies are outlined in this chapter. More-than-human theory is applied to better understand the affective forces and relational connections that are generated with and through humans’ encounters with nonhuman agents. I discuss the assemblages of humans and nonhumans that have come together and come apart as the COVID crisis unfolded. As I show, such an approach expands the One Health perspective in productive ways.
CONCLUSION: Reflections on COVID futures
This brief conclusion chapter summarises the key insights offered by COVID Societies, and then moves towards a future-oriented discussion. It is noted that throughout the book, a series of intertwined threads cross back and forth between the macropolitical and micropolitical dimensions of COVID-19: contagion, death, risk, uncertainty, fear, social inequalities, stigma, blame and power relations. Overarching these threads are five complementary themes: the historicity of COVID societies; the tension between local specificities and globalising forces; the control and management of human bodies; the boundary between Self and Other; and the continuously changing sociomaterial environments in which the world is living with and through the shocks of the COVID crisis. At this point in the pandemic, only uncertainty seems certain. As we learn to live with and through COVID, we must work towards better conditions for people across geographical regions. Acknowledging our vulnerability and using this knowledge to better care for the more-than-human worlds in which we are emplaced is a way forward to care more deeply about ourselves and our fellow species.
I’ve done quite a bit of research on the social aspects of the COVID crisis over the past two years – including posts on this blog but also books, book chapters, journal articles, pieces in places like Medium and The Conversation, and recorded talks.
I’ve made a new website bringing it all together in one place, which can be accessed here. I’ll be updating it as new publications come out.
From my collection of ‘COVID Life’ photos, December 2021
I have been busy checking out the explosion of peer-reviewed articles published recently in social science journals on the COVID crisis. I located over 120 such articles, and have conducted a rapid topic mapping process to support my own COVID-related research.
Over the past fortnight, I’ve put together a few open-access resources concerning what an initial agenda for COVID-related social research could be and research methods for conducting fieldwork in the COVID world.
It’s been a busy few weeks as I’ve moved to my new position as SHARP Professor in the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney. I am attached to both the Centre for Social Research in Health and the Social Policy Research Centre in the Faculty. But I’ve also established my own little research entity: the Vitalities Lab (click here for details).
I’ll be recruiting team members for the Lab very soon. I have a doctoral scholarship and postdoc positions to fill, and also have funds to support international visiting fellows.
The title of the Lab was chosen to encapsulate my hopes and plans for what we will do. ‘Vitalities’ points to engaging in lively social research methods, inspiring creativity, new directions, excitement and passion in research. It is also a nod to the new materialism theoretical perspectives with which the Lab will be engaging – particularly the vital materialism perspective espoused in the work of scholars such as Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti, Karen Barad and Donna Haraway. Vitalities further refers to the topics we’ll be exploring, which will be about human/nonhuman life itself: initially, people’s experiences with digital health technologies; living with data; and digital food cultures.
We will be running methods workshops, reading groups and other events.
Do get in contact if you’d like to learn more, make a visit to chat, start a postgraduate research degree with us, or otherwise collaborate in lively doings: d.lupton@unsw.edu.au
Image attribution: ‘Scattered light at Northern Spark’ by Tony Webster, Flickr, CC BY 2.0
Over the past few years, I have been drawing more and more on new materialist theories, concepts and perspectives, particularly in thinking through how humans live with digital technologies (which is the focus of all my research at the moment). The approaches I am currently finding most useful come from a range of perspectives.
Recently, I sat down to map out and categorise the different approaches with which I have been working that use new materialist thinking. I made a big table, and used this to jot down these approaches, the main concepts and questions with which they engage, some key researchers in each approach, and the key theorists each draws on. The PDF of the whole table is available here (fifth revised version added 26 October 2019): Overview of new materialism approaches
I also made a word cloud to visually represent the key theorists identified in the table, and their relative importance in the literature (below). This is an easy way to quickly show which theorists tend to be drawn on the most in this literature.
Below the table, I listed what I saw as common threads and key questions that emerged from the literature I had read when constructing the table. These are as follows:
COMMON THREADS: More-than-human worlds, human-nonhuman assemblage, vitality and vibrancy of things, ethico-onto-epistemology, relational ontology, sensory encounters, tensions between sameness and difference, how matter comes to matter, posthumanist performativity, identifying entanglements and shared agency, identifying exclusions, respectful engagements with disciplinary differences, the micropolitics of relations and affects, the generation and expression of agential capacities, encounters, forces (constraining and enabling) and intensities – how lines of flight might be generated – resistances, new possibilities for action or assemblages, thinking otherwise – intra-actions within assemblages between their various components- this includes power, which is transitory as it is enacted – interdependency between researcher and researched.
KEY QUESTIONS: How do objects under analysis establish conditions of action? How do humans incorporate and improvise with objects? What are the social lives of things? Which assemblages and networked power relations are they part of? How do the objects of study work and who does it work for? What imaginaries do they rely on and establish? Where are tensions/differences/novel formulations? Where are differences and exclusions? How do differences get made? What effects do differences have? What are the relations between things? How does matter come to matter? What theories can be brought to bear to make agential cuts of meaning? What are the affective intensities/forces and agential capacities generated by the assemblages under analysis? What do they do? After identifying the conditions of possibility (normalising agents), how to ‘think the unthinkable’/escape normalising discourses and habituated acts and open up new conditions of possibility? What are the ethics of more-than-human worlds and encounters? What lies beyond the ascendancy of the human – what is posthumous life? What can non-western onto-epistemologies offer?
This Sociological Life 