Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Claire Moll Namas
(London School of Economics)
Danny Cardoza (University of Cambridge)
Send message to Convenors
- Stream:
- Identities and Subjectivities
- Location:
- Julian Study Centre 2.02
- Sessions:
- Friday 6 September, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Uncertain futures are sometimes navigated by ethics and values, which are generationally reproduced, forming ethical relationships. Mobile technologies have dislocated ethical relationships to digital spaces. This panel explores how new ethico-digital relationships shape uncertainty in the future.
Long Abstract:
Around the world people navigate how to live ethical lives while facing everchanging, uncertain futures. These ethical relationships are complex and multivariate, involving scores of actors within ranging ethical networks that work to reproduce ethics and values. With the widespread introduction of mobile computing--including smartphones and mobile internet access--around the world, many of these ethical relationships have been dislocated to digital spaces, even within the most marginalized populations. For some, ethical-cum-digital relationships have become fraught as mobile technological assemblages intervene into past modes of transmitting ethics and values, while for others these digital forms of ethical relationality have facilitated ethical reproduction.
This panel explores two types of ethico-digital relationships of people facing uncertain futures: "digital interventions" which imply a sort of discontinuous relationship with the ethical past and "digital engagements" which suggest the reproduction of past ethical relationships.
We invite papers that explore the following questions: Do mobile technologies make uncertain futures more uncertain? Or, do these technologies provide avenues of solace in the face of the uncertainty? Are ethical lives being reimagined and values being reorganized around these digital interventions? Or, are digital engagements streamlining the ways in which ethics and values are reproduced?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 6 September, 2019, -Paper short abstract:
Rural Salvadorans use networks of confianza to produce their core value of solidarity in order to navigate uncertain futures. With the introduction of mobile technology, many are concerned that young people will not continue to enact the value and their futures will become even more uncertain.
Paper long abstract:
Rural El Salvador is a complex land of uncertainty. Evoked constantly is the notion that one doesn't know what tomorrow will hold. Thus, Evangelical women spend time in their local churches in prayer, some women form savings and loans groups with their friends, and others take buses to the capital to march against the privatization of water. These seemingly unrelated activities are all done because the only guarantee of life in uncertainty is that the future will be somehow fundamentally different than the present. In order to navigate these uncertain futures, Salvadorans, propelled by their core values of solidarity and unity, form networks of relationships of a sort of deep trust, confianza. Only through confinaza can anyone take any sort of action to begin to align oneself with another person to enact solidarity, which is said to be the best way to approach the uncertain future. With the introduction of smartphones over the last four years, some Salvadorans are concerned that their youth are not learning how to recreate these bonds of solidarity through networks of confinaza. In this paper, I explore how in a society where uncertainty reigns, mobile technology introduces yet another element of uncertainty and threatens the perceived continuity of collective values that have been enacted to navigate uncertainty.
Paper short abstract:
What does it mean to be a yoga and Vedanta student whose classes and learning processes are produced through the Internet? I seek to contribute to the understanding of the ethics and values constructed and performed around these students' relationship with their guru.
Paper long abstract:
This paper analyzes the meanings of being a yoga practitioner and student, according to the Vedanta tradition, and some implications arising from this type of experience lived by the informants. It is based upon fieldwork of a group of Non-dualism Vedanta students that live in Brazil and have classes with their guru mostly through the Internet. The meanings of this learning process will be portrayed, as well as its implications on the lifestyle of the group. Furthermore, matters such as ethical relationships and the reproduction of yoga's values constructed via the platform will be discussed from the perspective of the trajectories of these students. The main purpose is to observe the kind of religious beliefs practiced by the group, thus contributing to the understanding of the meanings of being "ethical" today.
Paper short abstract:
Jehovah's Witnesses understand the end of the world to be imminent, motivating them to teach with "zeal." With the introduction of mobile devices, new pedagogies are possible for Witness teachers. This paper explores these changes, while showing how the ethics of teaching still center around zeal.
Paper long abstract:
While Jehovah's Witnesses understand Armageddon to be a certain event that must absolutely come about, the timing of this event is a matter of great uncertainty for the religious organization. The imminent end of the world motivates a particular ethics of value transmission centering around notions of "zeal," which play out in the ways Witnesses proselytize and teach students. In 2013 the Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society went through a digital transformation, including the introduction of updated websites, the JW Library mobile app, and the encouragement of using electronic publications on and content when in the "field ministry," necessitating the use of smartphones and tablets. Now JW Library and mobile digital content is ubiquitous in the way Witnesses do their street evangelism, preach door-to-door, and teach students, making new pedagogies possible for the ways that "Jehovah's moral standards" are taught. In this paper I explore the ways that new pedagogies unfold and the new ethics they evoke in the face of the imminent uncertainty surrounding the end of the world. I argue that while the "digital interventions" of technological change create new pedagogical ethics, these changes are not discordant with and are instead subsumed by the ways Jehovah's Witnesses "engage" zealous work in the field ministry, creating continuities between past and future ethics in the Society.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how social media applications like Telegram have affected the most popular extracurricular activity in Russia, a humor game played by millions. Players use new digital fora to reinforce ethical values associated with the game, especially those about the social function of humor.
Paper long abstract:
Before television, people tuned in to baseball, football, and soccer games on the radio. Fans also read about results in newspapers, waiting anxiously to find out how their favorite teams had fared in competitions that only stadium-goers could witness. The competitions of the most popular youth extracurricular activity in Russia, a humor game called Club of the Cheerful and Clever (Klub Veselykh i Nakhodchivykh, or KVN) are often not broadcast, either. And even performances in televised leagues are not shown live. Fans don't see March Premier League games on TV, for example, until the summer. Thus, social media applications like Telegram and Instagram, as well as good old fashioned blogs, have assumed the role of radio for people who want immediate information about games and pre-game preparation. This paper examines how such applications have led to new ways of imagining the KVN community—a community comprised of millions of competitors. KVNchiki, as KVN competitors are called, use social media to (1) read live, textual reporting about distant games and (2) comment on the performances of others. On the one hand, decentralized social media reporting on KVN events constitutes a culture of comments on comments, of metapragmatic evaluation as lifestyle. On the other, KVNchiki use these new fora to reinforce ethical values associated with the game, especially those about the social function of humor, aesthetic priorities, and relationships between comedians and state power.