Mobile Utopia | Mobile Methods 7 March 2017

Monika Buscher

4.15-6.00pm in Bowland Nth SR 25

Disaster response can involve extreme physical and digital mobilities. In the aftermath of the 2015 Germanwings crash, for example, hundreds of emergency personnel from local and international agencies converged to scour two square miles of steep, rocky terrain for debris and DNA. Surrounding such physical mobilities are often myriad efforts to mobilise information and coordinate actions through digital technologies. New capabilities for disaster risk management that emerge in this context can be very positive, but they also raise complex ethical, legal and social challenges. In collaborative research with practitioners, information technology developers and interdisciplinary teams of researchers, my colleagues and I explore and shape futures of disaster risk management and the im|material im|mobilities of data. This takes the form of engaged ‘speculative’ sociology and involves a mixture of mobile methods, including participant observation and participant intervention, ways of ‘following the information’, affirmative critique, disclosive ethics, ‘mobilising’ utopia as method, ethical and privacy impact assessment, and speculative design. These methods are a means for ‘staying with the trouble’ of often ambiguous emergent ‘intra-actions’ and effects. In this talk I provide examples and explore how mobile utopia and mobile methods may be useful in building practically as well as theoretically fruitful understandings of digitally-suffused life.