Hannes Krämer’s research while affiliated with University of Duisburg-Essen and other places

Hackathons can be seen as an expression of current developments in labour in digital capitalism: they present themselves as experience- and technology-oriented events at which people work together on creative solutions to complex problems such as climate change, hunger or the mobility crisis. Participants come together for a limited period of time to develop digital solutions. But hackathons are more than just tech events for chopping nerds. They are an integral part of a creative industry dedicated to the technologically driven solution of social problems. The multigrafie discusses hackathons as a form of creative work and combines a variety of research perspectives in an innovative way.

Even though questions about the future have played a central role in recent times of polycrisis, border studies have long been relatively silent about the future. Our article develops a research perspective through which the sensitization of border research for the temporal dimension of the future can be achieved. To this end, social and cultural studies’ perspectives on the future are mobilized to approach the interplay of borderwork and/as futurework. We develop a foundation for an analysis of what we call “border future imaginations”. In this way, this study expands our understanding of border temporalities with reference to the future orientation of contemporary societies. Keywords: border temporalities; future; borderwork; futurework; sociology of time.

Used in the context of innovation-driven economies and civil society, hackathons are a good example of collaborative postdigital design processes and their focus on futures and the realization of new ideas. Hackathons are a widespread organizational form of designing the future in which digital solutions (such as apps, web-sites) are preferred. What becomes questionable in the process of designing, however , is the social form of the future. In our case study, we ask which futures are being designed and by whom. While empirically, these questions are often answered together, we disentangle them in our analysis of online announcements of hack-athons. We show how a feasible, designable, and achievable future is imagined through practices of problematization and scaling. We demonstrate corresponding models of subjects that are preferred for designing the future. With our praxeologi-cal analysis, we aim to contribute to an understanding of the micropowers of designing postdigital futures. While in principle, 'everyone' is invited to participate in the design process at hackathons, the announcements already show that only certain participants are desired, and only certain kinds of futures are imaginable through hackathons.

My contribution examines routines of cooperation. It investigates the ways and means in which cooperation is produced within the setting of contemporary employment. This line of questioning is based on two assumptions. Firstly, cooperation itself is the result of practical activities (see also Schüttpelz & Meyer, 2017). Cooperation is thus not simply given, but rather the result of various efforts (activities) and links (relations) that determine the specificity of the respective cooperation and its results.