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- Convenors:
-
Emine Onculer Yayalar
(Bilkent University)
Arsev Umur Aydinoglu (Middle East Technical University)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
With this panel, we want to examine how infrastructures of data and ritual shape moral and temporal orders. We explore where the technical and the devotional meet and trace how technologies of code and practices of devotion together to produce new ways of sensing and managing time.
Description
STS literature has allowed us to understand technologies as “time machines” with the ability to compose temporal orders. According to this perspective, temporal infrastructures are ethical and cosmological devices that mediate how time becomes actionable and how the future is sensed, managed, or deferred (Stine and Volmar 2021). This panel asks how infrastructures of data, ritual, and governance shape distinct relationships to duration, obligation, and future-oriented thinking.
Building on work that situates religion, science, and technology as co-constituted domains (Amrute 2010; Comaroff 1985; Asad 2003), we trace how infrastructures of data and ritual together sustain devotional life in late capitalism. From predictive climate models and blockchain archives to digital prayer networks and ritual databases, these systems sacralize technical practice and transform calculation into care and repetition into ritual. Through coding and devotional practice, people learn to endure repetition, work on themselves, and navigate the moral demands of time (Amrute 2010).
We seek papers that explore where the technical and the devotional meet: whether in digital piety, algorithmic prediction, ecological monitoring, or bureaucratic ritual. How do infrastructures that measure, record, or automate also shape moral sensibilities and spiritual expectations? What happens when the design of an interface or the rhythm of a device becomes a medium of faith, enchantment, or ethical reflection? By examining these intersections and boundary crossings, this panel invites proposals on how infrastructures link spiritual and technical worlds, and how they materialize the question of what kinds of futures are worth sustaining.