Digital Futures in the Making : Ethnographies of Anticipation, Infrastructures, and the Politics of Everyday Life

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.

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, and digital humanities, as well as those working in sociology and adjacent interdisciplinary domains.