Centre for Digital Cultures
Contemporary culture is characterized by the ubiquity of digital media technologies and infrastructures, which are constantly configuring our techniques for processing, storing, and transmitting data. As a result, our everyday practices of connecting, relating, reading, writing, perceiving, sharing, competing, and communicating are undergoing significant changes. At the same time, these technologies are closely tied to major societal challenges such as climate change, global conflicts, digital divides and social unjustness. In this dynamic context, the Centre for Digital Cultures (CDC) directly addresses the emergence of new and complex qualities of vernacular socio-technical life. This involves the development of advanced theory and innovative study programmes. We are concerned with the question of how we can understand and shape digital cultures today.
The digital shift re-shapes the cultural sectors, and, indeed, everyday life, politics, law, and economics. the Centre for Digital Cultures (CDC), affiliated to Leuphana University of Lüneburg, examines this shift through a range of interdisciplinary methodologies, including media, cultural and social studies, through knowledge creation and transfer, as well as by developing experimental and interventionist media practices. Established in 2012, as one of the first research centres in Europe to research the emergence of digital cultures, the CDC continues to produce cutting-edge research on socio-technical regimes of inclusion and exclusion. Since its inception, the CDC has built an innovative network and research environment, where academic institutions, practitioners, and civil society stakeholders engage with new concepts, formats, and applications within digital cultures.
Climate Futures
Scenarios for a sustainable future are developed in close connection with digital media technologies in science, industry, politics and cultural production. CDC researchers investigate how these climate futures are constituted, imagined and shaped in digital cultures. They explore their medial, social and technological situatedness under the premise that digital media technologies contribute to the climate crisis and at the same time offer solutions. In doing so, they update the research field of digital cultures with transformative knowledge about anthropogenic climate change and futurity as a (media and socio)cultural capability. The consequences of climate change for digital cultures and its infrastructures, the impact of digital cultures (AI in particular) on climate change and the implications for scientific research activities should be taken into account as far as possible in the various projects associated with the CDC in the interests of low-emission research.
(B)Orders, Identities and Belonging in the Digital Age
Today, border control agencies like FRONTEX rely on data-driven risk analyses for anticipating future migratory movements. Meanwhile, authorities extract and analyse data from asylum seekers’ mobile phones to establish their country of origin. Statistical offices use, in turn, social media data to produce more timely and accurate population and migration statistics while the identities of migrants and citizens are authenticated through digital devices like biometric passports and ID cards linked to interoperable databases. These examples illustrate the growing importance of the production, exchange and analysis of data in the constitution of political orders, identities and belonging. Building on insights from critical data and science and technology studies (STS), this research cluster therefore interrogates how borders, identities and political belonging are enacted and contested through data practices and digital devices. It starts from the idea that speech acts, practices and materialities are performative as they bring into being the realities to which they refer. Starting with the idea of performativity thus opens up a research agenda that focuses on how borders, migration, officially recognized identities, different categorizations of mobile subjects like ‘refugees’, ‘expats’ or ‘bona fide travellers’ as well as different notions of citizenship and political belonging are done in practice. Inspired by critical border and migration studies, this research agenda also explores how digital devices and data are appropriated, re-purposed and negotiated by the very subjects whose movements, doings and identities these data and devices are meant to monitor, control and regulate.
https://www.digitalidentities.eu/news
Cities, Infrastructures, Logistics, Platforms
Contemporary digital cultures are marked by the distributedness of computing, its becoming environmental and sensorial. Logistics is a particular case in point, where global supply chains as much as last mile delivery relies on a complex infrastructural setup of cities and broader environments of distributed and mobile computing, for example when apps on smartphones track the routes of shipments respectively the platform labour of delivery drivers. Platforms move into the centre of attention here as they become infrastructural, both broadly in terms of platform companies (such as Amazon or Microsoft) supplying the infrastructural back-end to the internet and more specifically when they mediate our interactions with our environments (e.g. maps for navigation) or various situated, social interactions (like shopping). Research at the Centre for Digital Cultures on the broad themes of cities, infrastructures, logistics and platforms takes these dynamics of comtemporary digital cultures into view. It also highlights the materiality and situatedness of computing, focusing in particular on cities as sites in which situated computing takes place, where platforms operate and where social life is increasingly mediated by digital infrastructures which algorithmically seek to modulate and control social, cultural, economic and political activity. This research area draws on methods from science and technology studies, which foreground the imaginaries, knowledges, practices and organizations attached to - and often in conflict with - these modes of computation.
The events at the Centre for Digital Cultures (CDC) are dedicated to central questions of digital culture as well as the effects of the current polycrisis on social life and, more broadly, on questions and research topics in digital media and cultural studies. Particular attention is paid to the involvement of digital media technologies in these crises.
The following events take place in the winter semester 2024/25: Download CDC poster, please see also sub-page semester topics.
Interested persons who would like to be invited to the videoconferences can register by e-mail to cdcforum@leuphana.de
Past video conferences are available on Vimeo
