About Our Lab
Worlds end and begin every day. From wildfires to earthquakes to pandemics, disasters regularly devastate entire communities, cities, and regions, radically reshaping lives and landscapes. Importantly, this devastation is not equally distributed; rather, its effects are often most acute for marginalized racial, ethnic, and Indigenous communities. But it is not only the headline-grabbing crises that reshape people’s lives. Simultaneously, vicious technologies regularly upend the lives of those vulnerable to racial, gendered, cissexist, and other forms of violence. All the while, the steady march of climate change threatens to destroy the planet as we know it. In the wake of these events — both acute and ongoing — lives are lost and communities chart new paths into the future.
Amidst all of this change — steady or sudden — people struggle with, against, and alongside information and data in various forms. AfterLab is dedicated to humanistic and critical social scientific study of information processes and orders before, during, and — most importantly — in the wake of personal, social, political, and environmental upheaval and transition.
Most importantly, the work of AfterLab is oriented toward the question of “what comes after?” What voices, practical and conceptual tools, and information infrastructures are necessary for building a more just, liberated, and care-full future?
AfterLab’s strength is in the way it integrates disciplinary diversity with a shared critical focus. Thematically rooted in the overlapping domains of critical information studies, critical data studies, and critical archival studies, AfterLab members support and reflect topical and methodological diversity, with particular emphasis on humanistic and critical social scientific methods. Regardless of the domain of inquiry, AfterLab faculty, students, and affiliates understand information as constructed and yet indispensable to how we conceive of life after various worlds — individual or collective, real or imagined — end … and new ones begin.
AfterLab research areas include, but are not limited to:
- how we think about and manage digital information after death;
- how information shapes local recovery after disasters;
- critical and ethical responses to changes effected by advanced data technologies;
- the ways archives and records are used and reused in the wake of epidemics;
- how critical issues of gender and race are represented in data during and after crises;
- how scientific data policies shape afterlives of data within and beyond institutional walls.
AfterLab activities will be arranged around three synthetic themes, each bearing on the other in indispensable ways:
Aftermath: How do we conceive of and struggle with data and information in the aftermath of disaster, and social movements? No disaster, crisis, or uprising is a singular event. It is essential to examine the structural forces that contribute to crises as well as their immediate, intermediate, and long-term effects. Historical and historiographic perspectives are key to examining disasters’ contributing conditions, their transformative aftershocks, and the infrastructures that afford particular kinds of responses — from the oppressive to the emancipatory — in the aftermath.
Afterlife: How do we conceive of and struggle with the afterlives of information and data, whether personal or collective? Whether a matter of individual digital online presences that persist after our deaths or one of institutions, collectives, and communities confronting problems of preservation and archiving in the face of novel technologies and unstable materials, it is imperative that we think critically and expansively about how information is preserved, represented, and circulated as projects conclude, institutions crumble, movements end, and new ones emerge.
Aftercare: How do we conceive of and struggle with ethical ideals as advanced data technologies and informational processes transform the conditions through which such ideals are practiced? Following the idea of trans “aftercare” (i.e., care practices of post-surgical recovery), we understand ethical commitments as affording particular actions and ways of thinking. Accordingly, critical attention must be paid not only to the transformative effects of technology, but to the affordances of those ethical commitments advanced in their use — including fairness, inclusion, care, and justice.