"This international research network approaches self-tracking and body monitoring technologies to study how media, technologies and embodied experiences are interwoven in complex environments and social practices. In so doing, we will advance the debate beyond discussions of these technologies as passive tools that are ascribed meaning by their users, towards an understanding of them as active co-constitutive elements of the environments in which everyday life is lived out, and of practice itself (Shove et. al, 2007; Latour, 1992). During the period 2016-2018 the research network will address the following broad research questions as a point of departure for exploring new and viable routes towards understanding contemporary and future processes of mediatization:
- How do body monitoring and self-tracking technologies emerge and become embedded in everyday life affecting the ways in which people perceive and communicate notions about themselves and their identities, socially and culturally?
- What theoretical and methodological tensions and possibilities arise when tracking technologies assemble and disassemble with bodies, selves and everyday lives
- How does the study of self-tracking technologies inform our understanding of the implications of the increasing ubiquity of automation and the growing presence of social robots in everyday life?
- What new theoretical concepts do we need - beyond those of mediatization and social practices - to investigate and understand the processes through which automated and robotic forms of digital technology and content become embedded in everyday environments, activity and experience?
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