Advanced Seminar in Media Technology: Serving Machines: Technology Innovation in Heterotopian Spaces

Advanced seminar in media technology by Anne Kaun, associate professor in Media and Communication Studies, and Philipp Seuferling, PhD student, both from Södertörn University.

Topic

Heterotopian spaces such as prisons and refugee camps are rarely connected to technological innovation. It is a rather a picture of absence of technologies that comes to mind when thinking of these enclosures, especially digital media technologies seem evacuated. Camps and prisons have, however, early on been part of technological innovation. The prison of the 19th century gave birth to the treadmill that is now standard in gyms around the world (Doan, 2015; Peters, 2018); ankle monitors are remediated as Fitbits (Bernard, 2017) and early approaches to gamify and gratify positive behavior (Hibbert, 1963) have been tested in the prison context. Meanwhile, refugees in Zaatari camp in Jordan pay with iris scans, and in Uganda refugees can earn money through an app, where they train AI algorithms.

This presentation engages with the innovation work to develop media technologies that is emerging in heterotopian spaces taking the refugee camp and the prison as two significant examples. Rather than looking into the centers of technology development – the silicon valleys, the South-by-South-West tech fests and unicorn hubs of the North, we highlight the contributions of incarcerated individuals and refugees to make technological innovation work. Refugee camps and prisons are here considered as testbeds for innovations that are on the one hand highly controlled spaces and on the other hand free of certain social and political concerns including privacy that is otherwise often hindering the use and application of new (media) technologies. We provide a historical analysis of how adjunct media infrastructural work and imaginaries have evolved over time.

Ultimately, we argue that incarcerated individuals as well as refugees are an important part of (digital) innovation work. While they have very little choice and agency in the process of for example passively testing digital technologies for surveillance purposes, it is important to highlight their contributions to innovation that capture not only the innovation work in the shadows of digital culture, but also represent an extreme form of mundane practices of serving machines that all users conduct in one way or the other.

Bio

Anne Kaun is associate professor in Media and Communication Studies at Södertörn University, Sweden. Her research is concerned with media and political activism and the role of technology for political participation in the current media ecology and from a historical perspective. She is currently studying the consequences of automation in public service institutions. Her research has appeared in among others International Journal of Communication, New Media & Society, Media, Culture & Society and Time & Society. In 2016, she published her book Crisis and Critique with Zed Books.

Philipp Seuferling is a PhD student at Södertörn University, Sweden. In his PhD project, he historically explores media practices among forced migrants, focusing on roles and functions of media technologies in refugee camps in Germany, 1945-2000. His general research interests include media history, media and migration studies, and memory studies.

Fika will be served generously.