Seminář Digital infrastructures in education
Jitka Wirthová představila svůj projekt na Tampere University: From hand-made to human-done: how human agency matters in digital infrastructures and how sociology can explore it?
S odbornicemi a odborníky na digital infrastructures diskutovala možnosti sociologie při zkoumání empiricky nejasného a teoreticky problematizovaného fenoménu lidského jednání.
From hand-made to human-done: how human agency matters in digital infrastructures and how sociology can explore it?
Annotation
In the project titled InfrAgent (2026-2027, Tampere University), I seek to explore the possibilities of sociological inquiry into human agency within current digital infrastructures. Current technological changes put human action in a different light than we have been used to – human action is beginning to reflect off the new digital culture in previously unexpected ways. Empirically, there is a salient infrastructuring of AI and other digital tools across most communication and work practices, including educational practices.
AI products are beginning to be plugged into all communication technologies and are, in a sense, becoming inevitable for people to use and to be used by. Also, a kind of resistance was observed in the case of a suggested label “human-made” or “huma-thought” within public discourse, similar to the older debates about the value of human-hand-made objects, or the organic origin of food (Bio). The value of human teachers and technology-free didactics is raised again. These shifting expressions and dynamics of resistance to AI and digitalisation also affect the way human agency (HA) matters.
From this context follows these questions:
- How human agency matters in current digital infrastructures and how the meaning of human agency is made through the infrastructuring of these digital tools?
- Relatedly, on the theoretical level, I began to ask, how questions of human agency matter in current infrastructure studies within post-human and more-than-human ontologies. What conceptual and methodological tools are available to address human agency sociologically?
However, there are several obstacles, which I will present. In attempting to bring human agency back into focus, I got inspired by two rich cultural traditions of reflection that have never abandoned explicit exploration of human agency: philosophy and art.
Drawing on existing sociological approaches to social ontology, namely processual sociology and relational sociology, which I connect to the work begun by relational philosophy, I will illustrate my work so far through a fieldwork conducted in December and January 2026 on one artistic intervention in one small town.
