No description available.

The purpose of this research was to describe technopolitics on a permaculture farm. The literature on technology and technopolitics is beginning to take shape around a series of unanswered questions regarding the role and potential of objects in social life. Using an actor-network theory framework and relying on Callon's (1984) sociology of translation and its principles, I identified the concept of defect and tracked how it was mobilized at Manitoulin Permaculture through participant observation across two summers. The concept of defect incorporated both sociopolitical as well as technological factors. The makers at Manitoulin Permaculture made sense of their choice to defect to a new life at Manitoulin Permaculture. In addition, their technologies, both new and old, became defective, animating their community in new and unforeseen ways.

The thesis explores a 5-year period in the political history of Spain. It looks at a series of political processes and projects, beginning with the 15M/Indignados social movement. These projects go from 15M in 2011 to the creation of new digital platforms for participatory democracy for the city of Barcelona in 2016. The thesis defends the idea that these cases add up to a cycle of political contention, which is defined as “the 15M cycle of contention”. It supports the idea that a core thread throughout the cycle has been the challenging of the liberal representative model of democracy and some of its key social forms, primarily in discourse, but also in practice. The cases within the cycle vindicated, and experimented with, alternative forms and practices of democracy. Concretely, they tried to move away from the current liberal representative model, preeminent since XVIII century, towards a more participatory one. The thesis also defends the argument that a key driver of these democratic experiments has been “technopolitics”, otherwise, practices and processes that hybridize politics and technologies (particularly, information and communication technologies). The thesis focuses on three paradigmatic cases of the 15M cycle of contention: 15M itself, a social movement born in 2011; the X party, a new party created in 2013 by 15M activists; and Decidim.barcelona, a digital platform for participation, launched in early 2016 by the Barcelona City Council, designed by people involved in previous projects within the 15M cycle. The first of these three cases covers the sphere of social movements and civil society, the second, that of political parties, and the third, that of the State at the municipal level. I look at the discourses and the practices of democracy in these processes and projects, and whether they innovate or not in relation to pre-existing political forms in social movements, political parties, and the State. In every case I look at the technopolitics deployed by the actors involved. For analyzing such technopolitics, I look at three main elements: discourses, practices, and technological infrastructures. These are used, respectively, as the main entry into the semantics, the pragmatics and the syntax of technopolitics. As a complementary view, I look beyond the cases and into the cycle. Concretely, to the variations in discourses on democracy and technopolitical practices. I suggest that the cycle as a whole can be conceived as: a) a process of “reassembling of democracy”, a reassembling oriented towards a democratization of the political field (and society more broadly) beyond the liberal representative model; and b) as a case of “technopolitical contention”, in which political struggles have been organically connected to technological practices. Since, differently from traditional democratization processes from XVIII century onwards, this one has not been oriented to establish but to challenge the structures of liberal representative democracy (f.i.: the current structure and centrality of representation, traditional political parties, Parliaments, etc.), I define it as an attempt at “alter-democratization”. I also show that this alter-democratization process challenges not only the forms, but also the ontology of liberal representative democracy, concretely, some of its key subjective and collective forms, as well as its key modes of political relation. By looking at civil society, parties and State institutions I try to map changes in various areas of the political field in liberal democracies. In that sense, the cycle has pointed towards (although has not always succeeded in bringing about) alternative political ontologies and forms of life. In order to analyze both the cycle and the three key cases under study, I have recurred to a multi-method and multi-disciplinary approach. I have primarily relied on qualitative methods, such as participant observation, fieldwork, interviews, and digital materials (blog posts, journals, etc.). I spent more than 5 years as participant in various 15M cycle projects. Secondarily, I have used quantitative methods: along with fellow activists and researchers, in 2014 we ran a digital survey that gathered 1000+ responses among 15M participants. Finally, I have also used social network analysis methods to map activity on social networks. In terms of disciplines, I primarily draw resources from political science, sociology, philosophy, and STS.

To date the concept of the bioeconomy - an economy based primarily on biogenic instead of fossil resources - has largely been associated with visions of "green growth" and the advancement of biotechnology and has been framed from within an industrial perspective. However, there is no consensus as to what a bioeconomy should effectively look like, and what type of society it would sustain. In this paper, we identify different types of narratives constructed around this concept and carve out the techno-political implications they convey. We map these narratives on a two-dimensional option space, which allows for a rough classification of narratives and their related imaginaries into four paradigmatic quadrants. We draw the narratives from three different sources: (i) policy documents of national and supra-national authorities; (ii) stakeholder interviews; and (iii) scenarios built in a biophysical modelling exercise. Our analysis shows that there is a considerable gap between official policy papers and visions supported by stakeholders. At least in the case of Austria there is also a gap between the official strategies and the option space identified through biophysical modelling. These gaps testify to the highly political nature of the concept of the bioeconomy and the diverging visions of society arising from it.

This dissertation approaches the geopolitics of river infrastructure in the Indus Basin through the structured interaction of "hydraulic regionalism" and "technocratic developmentalism". The former occurs when regional elites feel their access to river resources are threatened by upstream infrastructure development. The latter occurs when technocratic elites underplay the geopolitics of regional vulnerability by stressing the overall integrated development of river resources to maximize utility. The dissertation interprets archival, legal, and ethnographic data regarding the negotiation and adjudication of the Indus Waters Treaty between India, Pakistan, and the World Bank, as well as the implementation of the Indus Basin Development Fund Agreement. The dissertation also analyzes upstream/downstream tension between the Pakistani provinces of Punjab and Sindh. The contributions of this dissertation are in the fields of post-colonial state theory, the political ecology/economy of environmental knowledge, the geopolitics of river disputes, and Marxist methodology.

No description available.

This master thesis explores the dynamics of information flows between the hacktivist group Guacamaya, media outlets and social media users. The study aims to understand the role of various social actors within the digital space such as media outlets, journalists, bots, and trolls, in shaping public opinion and the overall effectiveness of the group's communication activities. A netnographic methodology was employed to observe the journey and transformation of information as it travelled from the hacktivist group to journalists and eventually to social media users. Tweets were obtained purposefully, to build a media ecology with sentiments, topics and where different actors interact with the information and with each other, modifying and reinterpreting the purpose of Guacamaya. The theoretical framework draws on the concepts of technopolitics, hacktivism, information flows, the network society and gatekeeping. My findings show how the Internet is a contested territory where attention and power are disputed. They also provide evidence on the complexity of the communication process in the digital space as all interactions from all actors influence the information flow. The conclusions highlight the new media ecology environment and the multidisciplinary role of actors in the digital realm. Furthermore, they argue that hacktivism as counterpower involves more than technical skills for uncovering hidden information and demanding accountability, but also strategic reappropriation for reducing inequalities and promoting just and inclusive societies. Hopefully, this thesis contributes to understanding the potential of hacktivists groups to drive political and social change through the understanding of a new communication environment.