Close

Monika Buscher

I explore the digital dimension of contemporary ‘mobile lives' with a focus on IT ethics. This combines qualitative, often ethnographic studies of everyday practices, social theory and design through mobile, experimental, ‘inventive' engagement with industry and stakeholders. An analytical orientation to intersecting physical and virtual mobilities, blocked movements and immobilities of people, objects and information drives this work. My most recent research brings this perspective to the informationalization of large-scale multi-agency emergency response, which raises opportunities and challenges around social media-based public engagement, agile and ‘whole community' approaches to disaster response, data sharing, data protection and privacy.

At the Speed of Soil: Futures of Earth

Source: http://www.dw.com/en/global-ideas-soil-erosion-agriculture-europe/a-18807131   David Montgomery (2007) writes: today it takes erosion less than 40 years, on average, to strip an inch of soil off agricultural fields – more than 20 times the geologic rate Humanity is living beyond the earth’s capacity in a way that can prove catastrophic in so many ways. Soil erosion is more […]

Read More

Mobile Publics: Futures

Mobile publics or ‘issue publics’ are coming of age. After more than a decade of gathering in hybrid digital public spaces, what are the promise, premises, risks of mobile publics in the future? With Belgians responding to calls not to tweet about emergency operations during the #brusselslockdown with images of cats, what are the effects […]

Read More

A Century of Disasters: Disaster Mobility Futures

  The fact that we live in a century of disasters is giving rise to calls for exceptional mobilities for disaster risk management. This ranges from physically mobilising resources (pumps, emergency responders travelling to global emergencies) to the mobilisation of digital humanitarians for crisis mapping to  calls for unprecedented interoperability between public, government and commercial information […]

Read More

Up in the Air: Clean Air Futures

Source: The Atlantic London’s Fogs lifted in 1956. But air pollution is a significant problem today. What are the mobilities of air pollution? Whose moves mobilise what? How are mobilities of emissions and particles controlled, blocked? What is the future of air pollution? Does participatory mobile measuring help? BBC article on how past-present-future come together here http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20151221-the-lethal-effects-of-london-fog  Article […]

Read More