Smartphone Cultures #WueOnline. Cultural Studies Colloquium Winter Term 2024/25
07/12/2024
As a transnationally open installment of our Cultural Studies Colloquia series, this online research seminar brings the perspective of cultural studies to bear on the smartphone as a key node in the cultural circuitry of our contemporary moment.
We will investigate the virtual world/s created, the online practices facilitated, and the 'artificial intelligences' articulated by the phone and by the digital networks to which it links its users. However, our primary accent will be on the real uses made of the phone in on-site social, economic or political contexts – and on the direct or indirect effects of such uses. How, for example, do the phone and the technologies it mediates impact individual as well as collective lives, agencies, intelligences or imaginaries? How does the smartphone – in analogue life as well as through online operations – transform social, economic, and natural environments? How is the phone produced and marketed, and what are the material or immaterial consequences? Hardly least, how do the smartphone and its affordances impact the political – either as a conduit for misinformation or as a low-threshold tool and portal of democratic participation?
To explore these questions, the seminar will determinedly move beyond Western European and North American contexts, putting a particular emphasis also on Eastern Europe and the countries of the former Soviet Union as well as on India and other regions of the so-called Global South. The objective is to consider both the local dimensions and the global intersections of smartphone culture/s.
