WIAS Seminar: Digital Needs and the Commons under Informational Capitalism
DATE AND TIME
Tue 6 June 2017
18:00 – 20:00
University of Westminster
309 Regent Street
117 Boardroom
London, W1B 2HW
A WIAS seminar with International Research Fellows
Dr. Sebastian Sevignani and Dr. Benjamin Birkinbine.
How can we define informational “needs?” What type of information is necessary for human development, survival, and social progress? In what ways does capitalism restrict the fulfillment of these needs?
In this seminar, Dr. Sebastian Sevignani reflects on what needs are, how they develop, and offers proposals for what informational needs might be. Dr. Benjamin Birkinbine focuses specifically on the informational commons as one way to provide for such needs, while highlighting the contradictions that these movements face under capitalism. The overall goal for this discussion is to work toward a critical theory of needs under informational capitalism.
Refreshments will be served.
Benjamin J Birkinbine
is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at University of Nevada, Reno. Whilst based at the Westminster Institute for Advanced Studies (WIAS) (2 May 2017 – 31 July 2017), Benjamin will be working towards a critical theory of the digital commons.
Sebastian Sevignani
is Assistant Professor at the Department for General Sociology and Sociological Theory, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Germany. Sebastian is based at WIAS from 2 May to 31 July 2017. During his fellowship, he will be working on a two-fold project that explores how we might reformulate the critique that capitalism subsumes need-development to profits and cuts off potentials for human flourishing under current circumstances of informatisation and social media.
We still have seats left for Digital Objects, Digital Subjects – An Interdisciplinary Symposium on Activism, Research & Critique in the Age of Big Data Capitalism on May 20-21 in Little Titchfield Street, London: