Digital Futures in the Making: Ethnographies of Anticipation, Infrastructures, and the Politics of Everyday Life (Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1032939486 ISBN 13: 9781032939483

Publisher: Routledge, 2026

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Samantha Lutz is a cultural anthropologist affiliated with the Institute for Anthropological Studies in Culture and History, University of Hamburg, Germany.

Anna Oechslen is a cultural anthropologist. She works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space in Erkner, Germany.

Quoc-Tan Tran is a cultural anthropologist. He works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Studies of Science at Bielefeld University, Germany.

Gertraud Koch is a professor of anthropological studies in culture and history at the University of Hamburg, Germany.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1032939486
• ISBN 13: 9781032939483
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 260
• Editor: Lutz Samantha, Oechslen Anna, Tran Quoc-Tan, Koch Gertraud