Gertraud Koch – författare

In recent years, digital technologies have become pervasive in academic and everyday life. This comprehensive volume covers a wide range of concepts for studying the new cultural dynamics that are evident as a result of digitisation. It considers how the cultural changes triggered by digitisation processes can be approached empirically.  The chapters include carefully chosen examples and help readers from disciplines such as Anthropology, Sociology, Media Studies, and Science & Technology Studies to grasp digitisation theoretically as well as methodologically.

Future Memory Work addresses a crucial challenge in contemporary pluralistic societies: the organisation of open, participatory and socially inclusive memory practices in digital media ecologies. It brings a novel relational approach to future memory work across institutions, people, and modalities.Advancing inter- and transdisciplinary research and rich empirical cases from across Europe and beyond, the book examines how memory practices in digital media are open for engagement of people with diverse backgrounds. It analyses the modalities of memory making and how they can enable institutional and public memory making with a broad spectrum of people and groups in civil society at local, translocal, national and global levels. The chapters examine the mediatized character of memory making, whilst also critically considering what obstacles and potentials emerge from participatory memory work. As a whole, the book is a comprehensive source of knowledge and ideas for creating socially inclusive, sustainable memory practices and futures. It sets the multidisciplinary research agenda for advancing studies of heritage in contemporary digital media as an element and a driver of cultural and social change.Future Memory Work is essential reading for academics, students and professionals working in the fields of Anthropology, Museum Studies, Digital Cultural Heritage, Memory Studies, Cultural Studies and Design.

Digital Futures in the Making brings together digital anthropology and anthropology of the future to examine digital future-making and its politics in Europe, contributing to the growing conversation in digital humanities about how technology is lived, contested, and imagined in everyday life. Taking a practice-oriented perspective, the volume explores both current engagements with digital technologies and the possibilities imagined around them. Spanning diverse domains such as cultural heritage, healthcare, and military robotics, the chapters discuss future-making as an open-ended process, foregrounding the role of everyday practices and politics in articulating near futures. The sections of the volume address three interconnected dimensions of digital future-making: imaginaries, which address how envisioned futures are negotiated; materialities, which consider how digital infrastructures are developed, implemented, and appropriated in daily contexts; and politics and ethics, which analyse the moral and legal frameworks that arise alongside the design and use of digital technologies. Digital Futures in the Making speaks to scholars, researchers, and students in anthropology, digital media, digital humanities, as well as those working in sociology and adjacent interdisciplinary domains.