PI: Annette Markham (project ran 2016-2021)
What happens when we shift from an explanatory to anticipatory mindset as a basis for social inquiry? How can we take a more deliberate approach to generating possible futures through research design and in situ sensemaking? What ethical possibilities emerge from taking a more proactive stance toward research as an intervention of future making?
A ‘reflexive anticipation’ epistemology can foster the type of experimental research design that works contextually as an intervention rather than explanation. Combining speculative design thinking, autoethnography, participatory action research, experimentalism, and a Haraway inspired mindset of tentacular thinking through various forms of SF (speculative fabulation, science fiction, string figures), an assemblage of methodological possibilities frame each sub-study in this project.
This framework was started is 2012, in response to Markham’s analysis that there was an urgent need for everyday users of social media to look past the seamless and seductive surfaces of their apps and devices to explore how their habits of use, along with powerful corporate agents, were building particular future trajectories. She began a series of annual (and ongoing) experiments to train youth to be critical auto-phenomenologists of social media to speculatively intervene in their own data futures.
From 2016-2020, the project was funded by an MSO professorship and Aarhus University Research Foundation Grant
How do people make sense of intensely local but digitally mediated and heavily networked events in the 21st Century? How do individuals deal with the enormous amounts of data they generate and accumulate in their everyday digital lives? What stories are dictated in this data and how much of the story does an individual actually control? At broader levels, how can institutions creatively design techniques to capture, and in the future revive, the digitally complicated experience of events such as Aarhus 2017?
This project will tackle these questions through the lens of information & communication studies, ethnography, and participatory culture. Extending an internationally recognized body of research to develop innovative and ethical methods for exploring digital culture, this project intends to:
–Contribute methods and frameworks to the RethinkIMPACTS2017 evaluation efforts;
–Build epistemological frameworks for thinking differently about the complexity of everyday social experiences in the digital age;
–Facilitate participatory workshops to enable citizens to explore and understand their own ‘big data’, and;
–Learn methods to better control and tell the stories that otherwise will be produced for them by social media algorithms.This interventionist project addresses an urgent concern about regaining control of our future cultural histories.
Read the justification and details of this project proposal here: