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Centre for Digital Anthropology Annual Lecture: Professor Katrien Pype
03 October 2022, 5:00 pm–6:30 pm
Tech imaginations of “the good life”. Re-imagining sociality.
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
UCL Anthropology
Location
-
Daryll Forde Seminar Room14 Taviton StreetLondonWC1H 0BWUnited Kingdom
Processes of digitalization are often accompanied by discourses about more efficiency, solvability, and better futures. These discourses are socially situated, and generate a wide variety of tech communities, and tech products, even if these are limited to the demo stage. In Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of Congo, tech entrepreneurs, the Congolese state, and humanitarian actors, all produce visions of cyberfutures. Imaginations about digitally mediated lives do not necessarily project images of material futures, but they are very much centered around future social formations. Discourses about cyberfutures express ideas about relatedness, how people should connect and interact with each other and with institutions. The tech imagination of the “good life” thus provides first and foremost a scenario for sociality. Studying the narratives about and expectations of tech connectivity fundamentally informs us about social life, and bears relevance beyond the subfield of “digital anthropology”.
This event will be held in person at the UCL Anthropology Department and live streamed on Zoom.
A drinks reception will be held afterwards in the department of Anthropology (14 Taviton Street, London WC1E 0BW)
About the Speaker
Professor Katrien Pype
Associate Professor (BOF) at KU Leuven University
Prof Katrien Pype is associate professor (BOF) with the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology (KU Leuven University) and honorary research fellow at the Department of African Studies & Anthropology at the University of Birmingham (UK). Prof Pype obtained a PhD in social and cultural anthropology at the Institute for Anthropology in Africa (now Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology) with a dissertation on the production of TV serials in Kinshasa (2008). Pype’s work focuses on popular culture and technology with a specific focus on Africa. Recent projects include smart city development in Africa, focusing on the the ways in which digital media is embedded in the prefiguration of urban futures, and explorations of the decolonisation of social sciences. Some representative recent publications include Crytopolitics: exposure, concealment and digital media (2022: Berghahn Books, with Victoria Bernal and Daivi Rodima-Taylor) and Coding the city: mapping eco-systems and zones of opportunity in Kinshasa’s emerging tech scene. Routledge Handbook of African Popular Culture; 2022; pp. 323 - 345: Routledge