Orit Halpern @ Goethe University, Frankfurt keynoting the ECO-Data School on July 1-3, 2025

Link to Eco-data-School

Encounters with data-driven technologies can hardly be avoided today, whether in scientific research, policy-making or everyday life. Even social and cultural scientists who are not working with quantitative data are confronted and challenged by ‘big data’ rationalities and by the processes and effects of datafication – epistemologically, methodologically and empirically.

Our double view of ecological data and data ecologies foregrounds the engagement with infrastructures and technical conditions of data production (data ecologies) and the specific implications of ecological data as a mode of knowledge production about ecological relations. Data not only produce information about ecologies and make environments knowable in specific ways; at the same time, data and their infrastructures generate new environments and ecological relations (Gabrys 2016).

Against this backdrop, the Summer School takes seriously the generative force of methods and their world-building capacities. Our aim is to foster a critical analysis of ecological data and an understanding of data ecologies, i.e. the data devices, infrastructures and processes involved in data production and analysis.

Invited Lecturers

• Susanne Bauer, Professor at the Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo, Norway
• Orit Halpern, Professor of Digital Cultures, Technical University Dresden, Germany
• Laura Kocksch, Assistant Professor, Department of Culture and Learning, The Techno-Anthropology Lab, Aalborg University, Denmark
• Boris Michel, Professor for Digital Geographies, University of Halle, Germany
• Julia Verne, Professor for Cultural Geography, University of Main, Germany