CANCELED - Toward a Sociomaterial Psychology of Mutual Caretaking in Digitalized Times (Niklas Chimirri)

The Psychology Department warmly welcomes you to a lecture by Niklas A. Chimirri (Roskilde University, Denmark) entitled: "Toward a Sociomaterial Psychology of Mutual Caretaking in Digitalized Times." Please find an abstract of Niklas's presentation below. The lecture will take place on March 23, 2020 at 18:30 on the 8th floor of the Quai d'Orsay Learning Commons.

Abstract

Increasingly converging, digital communication tools make us access a networked world of global information. They grant us previously unthinkable possibilities of gaining insights into what is happening beyond our graspable reach. But what is it that we get know, of other people, of the world, and of its interrelations? Or more specifically: what modalities of knowing are being presenced, and which ones may be getting absenced, among others via the innumerable, largely inaccessible and by now mostly automated editing processes that networked knowledges undergoes? As communication researcher Nico Carpentier has argued, having access to the world does not mean that one is interacting with it, let alone that one is participating in it. Arguably, the gap between knowing about the world’s problems and of participating in the world in order to make it a better place is widening – decreasing the possibilities for meaningfully being able to take care of the human as well as the more-than-human world one is part of. The talk presents a sociomaterial psychology from the standpoint of the subject, which is inspired by philosophy of technology, feminist technoscience, posthumanist studies of childhood, social praxis theory, and qualitative audience studies; a psychology that theoretically and empirically explores the fundamental relationship between imagining, knowing about, and acting on today’s largely digitalized world together with others from within everyday life. It draws on concrete examples from praxis studies of technology use among daycare children and their caretakers, in order to exemplify how the grand questions of how we can communicate and collaborate on future societal arrangements is always already present and at stake in intergenerational daily doings. For instance, it will be discussed how digital communication tools tacitly convey modalities of knowledge that invite for more deterministic control-thinking, in particular among the adults at the daycare. Meanwhile, these same adults also problematize that taking care of the children, of themselves, and of each other, increasingly seems out of reach given the conduct of everyday life they are seeking to maintain. What may too easily be lost from sight, it is argued, is that children’s more indeterminate and speculative imagining and acting are important corollaries of caring, but are not regarded as relevant for intergenerational knowledge creation – perhaps because children only seldom actively contribute to the editing processes of digitally networked knowledges? Social psychologist Niklas A. Chimirri is an Associate Professor at Roskilde University and a member of the Danish Centre for Research in Early Childhood Education and Care.