Short Abstract

This panel invites ethnographic and theoretical contributions that explore how digital imaginaries, technologies and practices mediate and materialise polarisation and how digital infrastructures shape affective orientations, moral imaginaries, and embodied relations.

Long Abstract

The “digital” has become inseparable from human and more-than-human life as well as the material and immaterial realities. Yet the accelerating presence of digital technologies transforms how we imagine and define ourselves and others. These digital imaginaries are continuously reshaping the “surfaces of the body” and “how we come into contact with each other” (Ahmed 2006). They have slipped from the realm of the extraordinary into the ordinary (Das, 2020) and make everything slippery and difficult to grasp. This, and the daily proliferation of futuristic narratives in this century, constantly challenge our very perception of the “body” and our existing definitions of here/there, presence/absence, present/future, touch/distance, connect/disconnect, inside/outside and intimacy/alienation.

Yet digital infrastructures create new affective and epistemic divides while amplifying existing social, racialised, and geopolitical inequalities. Their promise of inclusion and connectivity often relies on algorithmic sorting, platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2017), and affective economies that thrive on division and emotional intensification. The digital becomes both a terrain of participation and a mechanism of fragmentation; a site where empathy and hostility, solidarity and estrangement, circulate in accelerated, mediated forms.

This panel invites ethnographic and theoretical contributions that explore how digital imaginaries, technologies and practices mediate and materialise polarisation. How do digital infrastructures shape affective orientations, moral imaginaries, and embodied relations? How do they re-draw boundaries between self and other, here and elsewhere? And how might anthropology engage with these ambivalent digitalities – not only to analyse their polarising effects but also to imagine alternative ways of (un)being, sensing, and relating in a digitally mediated world?

This Panel has 2 pending paper proposals.
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