Deep Just Transitions: An inquiry on the socio-ecological transition through food and energy

Beyond the Myths of the Digital: Work and Nature in Transition
The Covid-19 pandemic has clearly shown the pervasiveness of digital technologies. Their ever-increasing integration within social spheres has not been unexpected, but the result (still in progress) of a series of transformations that began during the second half of the last century and that have affected a variety of domains: from the organization and management of work to sociality, through production processes, business models and their relationships with energy systems. The reasons why the narrative of digital capitalism is so successful can be traced in the so-called Californian Ideology and its myths, which has privileged a purely creative, virtual and immaterial vision of the digital. On the other hand, a growing literature has emphasized the multiple contradictions of the digital, which emerge from the analysis of its industrial organization and the specific international division of digital labor. Far from being immaterial tout court, indeed, the digitalisation shows its materiality through multiple interconnected operations that exert crucial impacts on the biosphere, on work (its modalities, its organization, etc.), on business models and energy systems, leading us to ask about its relationships with the ecological crises and its real sustainability.
The series of seminars "Beyond the Myths of the Digital: Work and Nature in Transition" aims to open the so-called "black box" of the digital in order to observe digital processes "in action", lifting its mystical veil by bringing out its materiality. In other words, arguing that "bits are atoms" means questioning the operations along the production chains of the digital, considering its intimate relationship with "living" work, with Nature and with Politics, and therefore also highlighting the contradictions in the narratives that dogmatically link the fate of the "green transition" to digitalization. Within this frame, and through different analytical lenses such as work, food, and energy, we will reflect on transition processes by disarticulating the logics that govern the current socio-ecological relationships, source of inequalities, oppression and waste. This critique, which aims to emphasize the contradictions of an unsustainable productive and reproductive model while also demystifying the concept of Just Transition (JT), seeks to pave the way towards the elaboration of counter-narratives that can enable the creation of new ways of both thinking and doing.

The seminar Deep just transitions: an inquiry on the socio-ecological transition through food and energy deals with the narratives of just transition. With the participation of Irina Velicu (University of Coimbra) and Mariana Riquito (University of Coimbra - University of Amsterdam) both currently involved in the EU Project Just Food, the aim of the session is to address and unveil the many contradictory faces of the socio-ecological transition, too often carried on within the logics of the green growth. Through the lenses of food and energy, we will focus on how these two commodities can be reconceptualized to alter harmful socio-ecological relations and lead to a just ecological transition.