An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Thiu Elias (Visiting Research Fellow, 2025)
Infrastructure, Knowledge, and Nature in Digitality: Ethical Interventions from the Digital Frontier of Tribal India.
This project explores Indigenous digital landscapes as frontier spaces where dominant technoscientific infrastructures encounter Indigenous religiosity and cosmologies, offering critical reflections on ethics in a digital age. While digitality is increasingly accepted as the normative architecture of public life, this research interrogates the kinds of worldviews it produces, and the assumptions it sustains and normalises. In Manipur (India), digital infrastructures intersect with a long history of technological dysfunction, militarisation, and political paternalism. Roads, surveillance, data systems, and conservation initiatives often operate as apparatuses of the state, extending what has been called “infrastructures of injustice.” In this context, the research highlights how Indigenous communities engage with digital technologies on their own terms, embedding them within spiritual, ecological, and communal lifeways. In doing so, they shape more plural and grounded digital cultures. The project questions: What is lost or reshaped when Indigenous knowledge is mediated by digitality? Who governs digital authority and representation? And how are anthropocentric assumptions in digital systems reinforced against indigenous cosmology? These questions speak to deeper concerns around power, epistemology, and ontology. Drawing on public theology and informed by ethnographic fieldwork, this early-stage project explores theoretical and theological pathways grounded in Indigenous spiritual sensibilities. It asks how Indigenous religious worldviews inform responses to technoscientific incursions; considers how theology might resist complicity with dominant narratives and instead act as a cosmological interlocutor, by amplifying marginalised voices and supporting ecological and epistemic justice in a digital age.
This presentation shares preliminary reflections and questions of a project aimed at engaging wider digital cultures; feedback is especially welcome to refine the project’s direction and its interdisciplinary positioning.
Please join in-person, or click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/81113670095
Passcode: 38bakW8E