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Abstract Designing social media technologies to promote digital well-being requires designers to face many challenges. In this article, we explore one under-explored challenge, relating to how conceptions of what it means to flourish online show significant cultural variation. We believe that today’s design-based approaches to digital well-being are hobbled by a lack of ethical attention towards important cultural variations. To remedy this, we explore the potential for an intercultural approach to digital well-being, one that respects cultural differences while preserving what culturally distinct conceptions of human flourishing have in common.
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Water flourishing in the Anthropocene
What does it entail to foreground water flourishing as a stance toward the Anthropocene? During an exercise at the Anthropocene Campus Melbourne, about twenty participants individually drew images of ‘water flourishing’ leading, with only one or two exceptions of Edenic representations, to a wall of images depicting no humans. That small experience reproduced a larger cultural and environmental management configuration: people-less water flourishing. If we face such constraints in imagining, representing, and enacting hydroflourishing, we remain stuck in familiar loops either of: 1) elemental thinking that excludes the human; or 2) anthropocenic thinking that too often addresses the human primarily as destroyer. How do we imagine our being with water in different ways? How do we move away from pervasive narratives of water crisis without, at the same time, romancing water? Feminist, decolonial, and Indigenous approaches to water and its cultural politics ask us to consider the elemental not only in substance, but also in rights regimes and in the project of flourishing. In this paper, we present examples of water flourishing projects and impasses from three sites: Kathmandu, Nepal; Perth, Australia; and the Florida Everglades, United States. All show both the problems and the promise of co-centering the human and nonhuman in their interdependent relations when it comes to water flourishing.
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- PAR ID:
- 10138746
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Cultural studies review
- Volume:
- 25
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 1837-8692
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 135-152
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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