To What Extent Can Post-Digitality Be Understood as “Life-World Hybridity”?, Dr. Luisa Conti, PD Dr. Fergal Lenehan (both Friedrich Schiller University of Jena), Dr. Roman Lietz (Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz), June 23, 4-5.30 PM (CET)

Laura Popa Announcement
Location
Germany
Subject Fields
Communication, Digital Humanities, Educational Technology, Cultural History / Studies, Colonial and Post-Colonial History / Studies

On June 23, 4-5.30 PM (CET), we will tackle this question: Can post-digitality be a “life-world hybridity”? Dr. Luisa Conti, PD Dr. Fergal Lenehan (both Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Germany), and Dr. Roman Lietz (Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany) will guide us in a journey on Wander. 

This event is part of the conference “Cultural Identities in a Global World: Reframing Cultural Hybridity” (June 23-25). Register by June 16: https://www.uni-giessen.de/faculties/gcsc/gcsc/events/conferences-symposia-summer-schools/conference-sites/cultural-identities-global-world/Events#workshop-postdigitality.

Abstract

"Like air and drinking water, being digital will be noticed only by its absence, not its presence". Nicholas Negroponte‘s memorable statement, written in a future-oriented article for Wired magazine in 1998, has never been more real than amidst the present pandemic. 

Our research group on Digital Interculturality would like to discuss cultural hybridity within the framework of post-digitality, understood here with Cramer (2014: 13) – echoing ideas of post-feminism, post-punk or post-communism – as a state of fuzzy, revised intensification of the digital; “the state of affairs after the initial upheaval”. Similar to and interwoven with the dynamics of “post-migrant” societies (cf. Foroutan 2019), the boundaries between the digital and the material, old and new media blur within the everyday human agency, interweaving intensely our life-worlds with capital-inflating big-data machines (cf. Anderson/Cox/Papadopoulos 2014).

Leading from these media and aesthetic theoretical positions, we would like to open up a dialogic space surrounding the following question: To what extent can post-digitality be understood as “life-world hybridity”?

Using a variety of participatory methods and digital tools we would like to engage with the participants of our workshop in a 90 minute long research project, a space to evaluate possible fruitful meanings of hybridity which may help in the understanding and describing of specific dynamics within post-digital societies. Every 15 minutes we will shift further from the tangible, individual self-experience of post-digitality and into the abstract dimension of intersubjective conceptual significance. The workshop will consist of an introduction to the theoretical framework, to the activities intended as well as a final presentation of the results, which will then complete the session. By applying the dialogic approach we expect to stimulate a multifaceted and polyphonic answer to the initial question, in which the fuzziness of post- digitality and the contradictory heritage of the hybridity concept may indeed mirror one another.

Instructors

Dr. Luisa Conti, PD Dr. Fergal Lenehan and Dr. Roman Lietz are members of the research group financed by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) “ReDICo: Researching Digital Interculturality Co-operatively”. Their collaboration makes meaningful use of of their differing backgrounds: Luisa Conti - intercultural communication and pedagogy, particularly interested in the interrelation among the concepts of dialogue, identity and culture; Fergal Lenehan - cultural and intellectual history, at present with a particular interest in theories of cosmopolitanism, cyber-utopianism and post-digitality; and Roman Lietz - migration and participation/integration in its various guises, structural, social, cultural or identificatory.

Contact Email
Laura.Popa@gcsc.uni-giessen.de