LUCSUS meets LUCSUS: Digital Utopias

From hype to techno-fix to good news to oh dear!.. we all have mixed feelings and perceptions about the rapidly emerging algorithmic technologies. Do they hold the key to tackle global challenges or do they represent our final demise? In preparing for this seminar, we realised the potential that emerges from fully embodying different versions of digital utopias. We will present two of these and also hope to tap into your perceptions, hopes, and fears about algorithmic technologies for or against sustainability. Come ready for some constructive agonism in action and digital utopias storytelling in the making.

Bios

Diego Galafassi is a sustainability scientist and transdisciplinary artist from Brazil. His research-practice is grounded at the interface of art, sciences and co-creative processes. He is a director, writer and producer of documentaries, experimental film, new media and participatory performance. In his Ph.D. “The Transformative Imagination” at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Diego blended systems approaches and artistic practice within co-creative spaces in East Africa and Europe to explore how imagination may be a source of transformative action. Diego is 2019 Sundance Institute New Frontier Lab Programs Alumni and Artist in Residence at Johns Hopkins at the depart of Immersive Storytelling and Emerging Technologies. At Lucsus Diego has led the project Arts4SDGs is is currently leading 'Wild Tech', exploring the role of emerging media in sustainability transformations. https://www.artsfortransformations.earth/wildtech

Maja Essebo is a human geographer turned sustainability scientist who’s currently working at the Lund University Centre for Sustainability Science where she explores the role of narratives in transformative processes. Lately, her focus has been directed towards algorithmic storytelling and how machine learning is used not only to compile and analyse data, but how these processes are in themselves narrative. She is also the LUCSUS Director of Studies and is working on incorporating alternative or even opposing beliefs into teaching as a way of creating a better understanding, and with it action, for a multitude of approaches to sustainability. 

Format: LUCSUS meets LUCSUS

The LUCSUS meets LUCSUS format seeks to foster a constructive academic dialogue between two or more LUCSUS colleagues. It may be colleagues who have never cooperated before, but work with the same theory or method, or who have arrived at the same topic from two different angles. With space to challenge and develop each other’s arguments, we hope that this format gives room for fruitful discussions that can enhance our collective knowledge, academic identity and create space for new dialogues across the department.

Venue and registration

The seminar will be a hybrid version. The in-person part will take in Wrangel, Biskopsgatan 5, room 117. You do not need to register to participate in person.

To join the seminar online please sign up here. You will then receive a confirmation email with a Zoom-link to the seminar.

The LUCSUS seminars are open for the public, held online or in-person and take place Thursdays from 11am to 12 noon. We are looking forwards to seeing you!