The Anthropology of the Digital

2024/2025

Academic Year

ENG

Instruction in English

3

ECTS credits

Delivered at:

Department of History

Course type:

Elective course

When:

1 year, 1 module

Instructor

Рахманова Лидия Яковлевна

Course Syllabus

Abstract

The aim of the course is to introduce the emerging anthropological perspective on the digital and thus offer new critical optics in the field of digital humanities. Rather than looking merely at how the digital may be used in research, the course asks what is the sociopolitical world that digital technologies produce. The course charts the workings of the digital platforms, devices, data and infrastructure in their effects and new forms of relations of power in the contexts of biopolitics, new media, political technologies and sovereignty, economy and corporations, everyday services, subjectivity and corporeality, including coming of age, death and personal identity. Rethinking digital social and political domains also presupposes rethinking research ethics and practices of digital ethnography. The course addresses key debates and advances in these fields.

Learning Objectives

• Critical reflexion of the effects of the Digital phenomena in modern society through anthropological lenses

Expected Learning Outcomes

• The student acquires an anthropological perspective on the concept of phisycal and digital space

Course Contents

• Genealogies of the Digital Humanities
• Multispecies Ethnography , Cyborgs and Hybridity
• Ontologies of space in digital and pre-digital world
• The Spatial Dimension of the Digital.
• Clean fake and digital biopolitics
• Religion and The Digital
• Political dimension of BigData
• Coming of Age in Social Networks
• Death and anonymity in a digital society
• Friendship, sexuality and distance in the field of the Digital
• Identity of a human and identity of a User: new regimes of subjectivity.

Assessment Elements

• Содержательное участие в дискуссиях на семинарах курса
• Essay

Interim Assessment

• 2024/2025 1st module
  ДС*0,3+Э*0,7 (где ДС - участие в дискуссии на семинарах, Э - итоговое эссе по курсу)

Bibliography

Recommended Core Bibliography

• Boellstorff, T. (2012). Ethnography and Virtual Worlds : A Handbook of Method. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsebk&AN=482161
• The production of space, Lefebvre, H., 1991

Recommended Additional Bibliography

• Boellstorff, T. (2016). For Whom the Ontology Turns: Theorizing the Digital Real. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&site=eds-live&db=edsbas&AN=edsbas.C627D360

Authors

• RAKHMANOVA LIDIYA YAKOVLEVNA