Future Ecologies is about a “time-space-mattering” that calls into question common knowledges about the relationship between space, place, territory, and the linearity of time in light of the circulation of matter, energies, and affect. It also questions the meaning of past ecologies and unsustainable futures for emergent ecologies, while problematizing the ambivalent histories of environmental knowledge, especially in the interplay of modernity and coloniality. Reading research in the Future Ecologies series allows you to take the many facets of past ecological thinking into account, to reveal its differentiated and often contradictory political implications and effects—and to criticize its, sometimes, naïve promises. Studying Future Ecologies means not taking for granted what ecology means.

The series promotes a relational thinking that is aware of the environmental, economic, social, and individual complexities of such a pluriverse driven by equally complex technologies and infrastructures. As Donna J. Haraway said, in a shared world “nothing is connected to everything, but everything is connected to something”. This connection generates and discloses different scales of responsibility. We dedicate this book series to all earthly critters who want to invent and try out new forms of life and styles of cohabitation, who ask which risks we want to and are able to take, and which futures we dream of. We invite contributions that address the geopolitical inequalities of climate change and capitalist extractivism, that deal with politics of (un)sustainability and (de)futuring, technologies of recycling and environing, non-anthropocentric epistemologies and practices of world-making.

The Future Ecologies series advocates for interdisciplinary approaches towards the numerous aspects of ecology. We invite junior and senior scholars from various disciplines in media, cultural and literary studies, anthropology, design, architecture, and the arts to build collaborations between different voices, practices and knowledges—that is: heterogeneous communities of practice. By endorsing open access publishing, the series also aims to partake in the current transformation of the ecologies and economies of knowledge production.

The Future Ecologies series is edited by Petra Löffler,
Claudia Mareis, and Florian Sprenger.

The series Configurations of Film presents pointed interventions in this field of debate by emerging and established international scholars associated with the DFG-funded Graduate Research Training Program (Graduiertenkolleg) Konfigurationen des Films at Goethe University Frankfurt. The contributions to the series aim to explore and expand our understanding of configurations of film in both a contemporary and historical perspective, combining film and media theory with media history to address key problems in the development of new analytical frameworks for the moving image on the move.

Series Editors: Vinzenz Hediger and the Board of „Configurations of Film“

Edited by Erich Hörl and Yuk Hui

Thanks largely to the works of philosophers who are inspired by him, most notably Gilles Deleuze and Bernard Stiegler, the name Gilbert Simondon is becoming more and more familiar to readers outside France. Up to the time of writing this preface, however, few of his works have been translated into English. It is almost an irony that we call this book series After Simondon, dedicated as it is to a thinker who is not yet fully available to his readers. However, After Simondon does not mean to overtake Simondon by declaring his thought obsolete, but rather to address him as our contemporary. Indeed, there are challenging contemporary issues that Simondon did not and could not address in his time, yet which his thought retains the power to interrogate, problematize, critique and illuminate.

This book series traces the implications as well as the critiques of Simondon’s thought. It aims to go one step further than simply resituating Simondon as a neglected great twentieth-century philosopher of technology. Simondon was not merely a philosopher of technology but rather one whose ambition was nothing less than to rewrite the history of philosophy according to the concept of individuation and to invent a philosophical thinking that could effectively integrate technology into culture. After Simondon thus poses the question: What could critical thinking and theory concerning technology and individuation be after Simondon—that is, both following Simondon  but also going beyond him and transgressing his thought?

We contend that Simondon’s concepts and observations could serve as a rich source for the development of new concepts, theories and practices for coping with our contemporary condition. This includes a wide range of topics from digital objects and techno- and media-ecologies to what might be called a ‘technological humanism’; from individuation, inventions and imaginations to perceptions; from animals to technical systems; and from issues of the automatic and alienation in thetwenty-first century to the process of cyberneticization. We hope that this series can act as a continuation of Simondon’s projects, and we welcome proposals from scholars who are working on such subjects in relation to Simondon’s thought.

Our present, characterized by machine-learning processes, technological infrastructures, and emerging data worlds, urges us to think about how media are shaping the conditions under which we live, socialize, communicate, organize, and learn. Searching for media as preexisting conditions of our everyday lives requires us to question the parameters, the limits, the times, the spaces of media today. How do media form our current situation? And how does the situation make use of them?

This book series looks at these questions by examining the often hidden “terms of media” under which users operate. Rather than producing a set of explanatory keywords to describe media practices, the aim is to understand the conditions under which media are produced, and the ways in which media impact and change those conditions. Clearly, recent technical developments have led to the idea of an always-available knowledge. At the same time, this has transformed the very nature of knowledge production itself, including the assumption that more data must lead to more knowledge. Beyond the mere accumulation of data and knowledge, disciplines—from sociology to economics, from the arts to the humanities—are increasingly in search of media as a way to add context and reinvigorate their methods and objects of study. Exploring the situation of digital media and technology, this series asks: What are the conditions of media knowledge today?

To answer this question, each book features interventions by several authors whose approaches to a concept or term diverge and converge in surprising ways. By bringing together scholars from different intellectual fields and academic regions, this series aims to advance media and technology theory by provoking new descriptions, prescriptions, and hypotheses—to rethink and reimagine what media can and must do today.

In Search of Media is a joint collaboration between meson press and the University of Minnesota Press.

Edited by Christian Herzog, Volker Grassmuck, Christian Heise, and Orkan Torun

Media, Democracy & Political Process sets out to address the impacts of digitization on politics, culture and society. The book series explores how the emergence of digital communication affects established modes of policy-making and representation as well as socio-cultural values, identities and networks.

The main questions that publications appearing in the series seek to answer are: What consequences arise from the digital shift for traditional political institutions and processes of decision-making and for the media and communication systems in twenty-first century democracies? What new opportunities and risks are posed by digital technologies in terms of civic engagement and more transparent and inclusive policy-making processes? Which new forms of public sphere, social change and cultural techniques are evolving? These and related questions are addressed from a variety of perspectives, incorporating historical approaches and cross-country comparative research.

The series seeks to publish original research and contributions by experts and practitioners from the fields of politics, civil society and non-governmental organisations and regulatory agencies. It aims to contribute to the lively discourse on political and social implications of digital media technologies while working towards models and options for addressing current socio-political and -cultural challenges.

Edited by Andreas Bernard, Armin Beverungen, Irina Kaldrack, Martina Leeker, and Sascha Simons

The current digital shift has been described as a motor of comprehensive cultural change within which we constantly have to localise ourselves. Its influence on our cultural and political self-image, our medial ways of worldmaking, our global and local connections and responsibilities, as well as our social coexistence, is renegotiated with each technical innovation. To think through the relationship of routines, information flows, communication acts and spaces of action with digital technologies is the aim of the book series Digital Cultures.

Digital cultures arise in different contexts and times. By observing their variable aesthetic, social and technological characteristics, we can observe how they are practiced, stabilised or undermined. In this sense we are confronted with a heterogeneous field of phenomena as much as with an imaginary harmonization when we speak of digital cultures. Every theoretical access to their presence should therefore be aware of its origins and its location. That is why the book series is shaped by a transdisciplinary attitude and a gathering of very different perspectives, as much as it is marked by an entanglement of new methods and established approaches. In this way we can seek to characterize and render discursive the apparatuses, institutions and practices of digital cultures. What forms of perception and cognition, interaction and cooperation, subjectification and control accompany them?

The book series Digital Cultures presents contributions which expose themselves to decisive fault lines: the diversity of approaches from media studies, social and political sciences, the tension between contemporary and historical-epistemological perspectives, as well as the conflicts between their respective methods. Our authors hold these debates in three formats: in Conversations they discuss a specific problem or a controversial thesis and lend insight into processes of thought and the development of arguments; Essays are short monographs, which take on current challenges in a concentrated manner; Collections consist of a small number of chapters that pointedly discuss specific questions from different perspectives.

The book series appears both in print and in open access. It is thereby part of the current transformation of knowledge production, the economics of information and of distribution channels. In this sense all contributions to Digital Cultures trace the contours of the present and show what it means not to be able to step outside of it.

The book series is edited by the Centre for Digital Cultures at Leuphana University of Lüneburg.