Infrastructuring Solidarity: Towards Careful Abolition – A Post-digital Media Theory of Solidarity
Dr. Maja Figge, ICGP, and Jun.-Prof. Dr. Jasmin Degeling, Bauhaus Universität Weimar
Jul 1, 2026 – Dec 31, 2027
At a time when the internet is no longer simply reproducing discrimination, but technofascism has become hegemonic, this project asks how solidarity can be infrastructured in postdigital media cultures to create livable forms of life for differentially affected people. Social media platforms create synergies between political economy, media infrastructure and fascization due to their economic and affective structures and affordances of connectivity, attention and (in)visibility. Providing key connections to the world, social media permeate all areas of life and the everyday, transform perception, subjectivation, and concepts. Thus, what binds us socially is mediatized and differentially experienced along the axes of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability.The project opens up current debates in the field of digital media research and critical infrastructure studies by confronting them with Queer infrastructuralism and abolitionist approaches. Looking for unexpected failures, coincidences and glitches within current netcultures, we seek to find practices of solidarity in the now that may set into motion reparative processes of maintenance and reconfiguration. We follow such processes in order to open up the possibility of infrastructuring solidarity in post-truth times of multiple social divide(s) and unequal capabilities of participation and survival. By taking this speculative route, this project proposes the radically democratic project of careful abolition.
VolkswagenStiftung, Förderinitiative: Aufbruch – Neue Forschungsräume für die Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften
https://projektdatenbank.volkswagenstiftung.de/projekt/0200556
Project Number: 0200556