ICS Seminar - Luke Munn, Girish Lala, Linda Marsden and Christopher Lean
Technologies of Urgency / Technologies of Resilience
Event Details:
Date and Time: Thursday, 7 April, 11:30am - 1:00pm
Location: online via Zoom. Please RSVP via email to e.blight@westernsydney.edu.au to receive the Zoom details for this seminar.
Chair: Sarah Nectoux
Panellists: Luke Munn, Girish Lala, Linda Marsden, Christopher Lean
Abstract
For much of the 2010s, “automation” served as a keyword marking a crisis-to-come. “Automation and the future of work?” was a common headline. As promise or provocation, it foretold a new and weighty subject to which we urgently need to pay attention. Watch out, or sit back: either way the robots are coming. The old limits to technological advance would, we were told, fall away with the arrival of AI.
Instead, with COVID lockdowns, we have been reminded that our relationship to technology is always more than one of inertia or distance. Work and social habits were now re-channelled through the screen, and at the mercy of ever-unstable Internet connections. No less, the screen itself became the object of dependence that helped acculturate us to the suddenly urgent sciences of epidemiology, mass communication, urban containment and remote counselling. As broadcaster of crisis, it could produce a sense of urgency without prospect for response. As mediator of community, it could help attenuate anxiety and prepare for renewal.
This week’s panel brings together ICS scholars whose applied and theoretical work has been at the forefront of examining connections between science, technology, resilience and crisis. Together they explore how the social relations of technology have been changing, and where new openings for shifting those relations might appear.
Biographies
Girlish Lala
https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/staff_profiles/WSU/doctor_girish_lala
Linda Marsden
Luke Munn
Chris Lean
https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/ics/people/researchers/christopher_lean
