Life among the Ruins
Without stories of progress, the world has become a terrifying place. The ruin glares at us with the horror of its abandonment. It’s not easy to know how to make a life, much less avert planetary destruction. Luckily there is still company, human and not human. We can still explore the overgrown verges of our blasted landscapes…
(Tsing, 2015, pp. 282).
Digital intimate publics express that the “vibe is off”, a sense that things aren’t quite right as we doom scroll on and on and on. A state of precarity and instability has left ruin and decay in its wake. From failed political systems, burnt-out utopias and bombed out landscapes, to the eerie and empty urban spaces of the mass industrial era, the persistent rubble left from (neo)colonisation and cultures threatened by climate crises, to recently obsolescent technologies, hyperlinks rotting away, and glitchy automated systems.
Despite the rubble seeming dead and inert, Anna Tsing (2015) reminds us that ruins are lively places where new multi-species and multi-cultures thrive. From a flattened out, ruined landscape, new possibilities grow. Ruins can be enclaves of hope as much as mourning, loss, and longing: they not only invoke nostalgic reflections, but open up space to dream and imagine the future.
Digital intimate publics share the affective experience of life amid the ruin. They are formed in circumstances of something being ‘off’, of being squeezed, constituted from positions of non-dominance. Digital intimacies come to be not in the gleaming corporate towers and cathedrals, but in the messy in-between spaces where resilient, creative practices of ‘making do’ emerge.
For Digital Intimacies 9 we ask in what ways are digital intimacies reckoning with the ruined structures they find themselves in? Our program showcases scholars from a wide range of disciplines, who critically engage with, interpret, locate, theorise, or dissect the notion of life amid the ruins in abstract and creative ways.
References:
Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton University Press.
Registration
Registration for Digital Intimacies 9 is now open.
Click here to register – registration remains open till the end of the conference.
Program
We are delighted to present the program for DI9, and also want to extend our thanks to everyone who sent in abstracts. It was a tough selection process, and we wish we could have invited you all.
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Download the program here in pdf form
Keynotes
Digital Intimacies 9 are honoured to announce that we have secured two outstanding keynote speakers.
Dr Zahra Stardust is a sexualities scholar at the intersections of culture, media and law, who will be speaking on the topic of Sex Tech Among the Ruins.
To read Dr Stardust’s bio and an abstract of her keynote, click here.
Unfortunately, Dr Jessa Rogers, who was scheduled to be our opening keynote is no longer able to attend. We send our thanks to Dr Rogers for the work she has done for DI.
We are delighted to announce that Talei Elu will instead be giving the second Keynote.
To read Ms. Elu’s bio and an abstract of her keynote, click here.
Conference venue and hosts
Digital Intimacies 9 is a free conference, jointly hosted by the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology and Digital Cultures & Societies at University of Queensland. The conference is a hybrid event and will take place at QUT’s Gardens Point campus and online.
The conference will take place at the QUT Gardens Point campus, S Block, Level 12 in the Owen J. Wordsworth room (lift access available).
We acknowledge the Turrbal and Yugara as the First Nations owners of the lands where QUT now stands.
Important dates
Call for papers open: 24 July 2023
Call for papers close: 23:59 AEST, 1 September 2023 (extended from 25 August 2023)
Decisions released: 6 October 2023
Conference dates: 14 to 15 December 2023
Any questions?
Please email Lucinda Nelson at L5.nelson@qut.edu.au