Technoenvironments

Technology enables invisible, physical and social infrastructures accumulating into technoenvironments. These networks of artifacts, relations and human and non-human bodies and landscapes are increasingly becoming the core of life, work, culture and identity in Southeast Asia. It is necessary to put these interweavings into a critical perspective by positioning the realities of the digital and technological world in a context of colliding socio-political, cultural and natural environments (Jurriëns and Tapsell Reference Jurriëns and Tapsell2017). We are interested in the relationship between infrastructural materialities and contemporary socio-technical and natural environments in particular with respect to power relations, social imaginaries and transdisciplinary research. This critical approach contributes to the conceptualisation of technoenvironments constituted as hybrid spaces with consequences for social and political in- and exclusions, economic advantage and exploitation and the ecological relations between humans, more-than-humans and the world.

We employ the notion of technoenvironments to mark a historical conjuncture at which technological progress and imaginaries of modernity have vast environmental impact. In particular we illuminate the entanglements of environmental destruction and aspirations to well-being and a good life in contemporary Southeast Asia (Nguyen et al. Reference Nguyen, Wilcox and Lin2024). This is pronounced by the undeniable chance the Capitolocene brought about in this region of the world with unpreceded economic growth accompanied by ruthless instrumentalisation of humans and more-than-humans. Thus, Southeast Asia appears as a particular region, where the belief in capitalistic progress has left its lasting mark on the planet and its inhabitants’ well-being.

This special issue is an outcome of a double panel at the EuroSEAS conference in Paris in 2022 in combination with a laboratory investigating the effects of emerging technoenvironments in Southeast Asia and the resulting methodological challenges. The authors took the conference as a starting point to elaborate what a critical post-COVID and postcolonial theorizing of the socio-ecological and technological spaces in Southeast Asia entails. Southeast Asia presents itself as a testing room for technological futures. The panels in conjunction with the interactive laboratory invited different perspectives from disciplines as diverse as anthropology, political science, history, philology, socio-ecology and area studies. The contributions assembled in this special issue tackle different facets of technoenvironments focusing on case studies from Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam, thereby outlining tendencies of socioecological, technological and social change across Mainland and Peninsular Southeast Asia.

Technological progress and change have been integral drivers of socioeconomic transformations in Southeast Asia, since the 1980s/90s (Kurfürst and Wehner Reference Kurfürst and Wehner2020). Malaysia’s aim to become a knowledge society, Singapore’s transformation from labour intensive to a high-tech export-oriented industry and the recent development of industries 4.0 throughout the region (e.g. Vietnam, Indonesia) are all driven by massive technological change. On another note, the pan-Asian social movement called Milk Tea Alliance is facilitated by social media, allowing citizens from different nation-states to unite in solidarity, and in opposition to authoritarian regimes (Thailand and Myanmar for SEA and Taiwan and Hong Kong for East Asia) (Schaffar and Wongratanawin Reference Schaffar and Wongratanawin2021). The examples show the entanglements of technological change with processes of decolonisation, nation-building and civil society development.

Technoenvironments are constituted and mediated by material infrastructures, connecting and simultaneously excluding people, things, and ideas. More empirically grounded work is needed in the field of socio-materiality to reveal interlinkages between newly introduced technologies and socio-political realms. Material characteristics of things and technology dictate the particular forms for their conceptualisation (Holbraad Reference Holbraad2011). According to Latour (Reference Latour2005) ‘the social’ is an assembly of human and non-human interactions. Alaimo and Hekman (Reference Alaimo and Hekman2008) underline that the non-human realm has signifying force and intersectionality determines human-material connections.

Thinking about technoenviroments ultimately calls upon the notion of hybridity. However, to avoid a mere anything goes or rather everything is related, differentiation is inevitable for analytical sake. However, these ontological and epistemological devices embedded in categories like “natural”, “cultural” or “technological” are historically and geographically contingent. The boundaries between these fluid categories are contested and overladen (Barry Reference Barry2001), especially given the post-colonial context of Southeast Asia. Two camps dominate the debate on who has agency in technonatural worlds and where it is located. On the one hand, the neo-marxist cyborg approach by Swynedouw (Reference Hinchliffe, Whatmore, White and Wilbert2010) sees agency in human social worlds only with the likeliness, that non-humans are relegated to the background where they function as “nature” to the unfolding of social people. On the other hand, more-than-human approaches (Whatmore and Hinchliffe Reference Hinchliffe, Whatmore, White and Wilbert2010) see agency distributed in hybrid networks consisting of anthropomorphised other-than-humans. Assigning personhood to them may result in possibly overlooking subaltern human positions. Within the framework of feminist political ecology, both approaches must answer how non-human actors in technological and ecological networks articulate political agency. Thus, the level of analysis decides on the possibilities to pay attention to local nuances and textures, while also keeping in mind macro networks, for example of capitalistic logics, that penetrate the micro and meso level alike.

As a result, we employ the notion of technoenvironments to address the interlinkages between newly-introduced technologies and socio-political realms, combining insights from Science and Technology Studies, sustainability studies, with approaches from area studies and arts-based research. Accordingly, we identify the three intersecting themes: 1. Social media and politics. 2. Imaginaries and 3. Socio-ecological transformations.

Social Media and Politics

Southeast Asia is the region of the world in which societies are most permeated by social media (Wearesocial 2024), a tendency, which accelerated after the Covid-19 pandemic and through large infrastructural investments and integration in the wake of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (Rowedder and Tappe Reference Rowedder, Tappe, Tappe and Rowedder2022; Sidaway et al. Reference Sidaway, Rowedder, Woon and Pholsena2020). The very countries that have made a spectacular turn towards authoritarian governments are also the ones that are worldleading in social media penetration. For example, political campaigns in national elections make use of bots and trolls (e.g. Philippines), while networked social movements such as the Milk Tea Alliance organise and coordinate civil society actions through digital networks, mostly social media, and are driven by youth activism (Sastramidjaja Reference Sastramidjaja2025). Social power relations are reproduced, augmented and challenged in new technical environments.

The articles in this section by Wolfram Schaffar and Patrick Keilbart focus on the political realm and its technology-mediated change. It observes the transformation of power relations affecting the political sphere, the organisation of labour and class divisions. By focusing on digital networks, they examine different facets of technoenvironments. In the realm of social media and politics technoenvironments are considered as 1) sociotechnical infrastructures provided by multinational companies and censored or facilitated e.g. through legal frameworks of national governments, 2) as hybrid spaces that offer room of manoeuvre for civil society actions, and at the same time a means of oppression by authoritarian governments, and finally 3) as a form of labour. With regards to the latter, Wolfram Schaffar argues that in the context of a far-reaching digitalisation and platformisation in the world of material reproduction, consumption and social life, a meaningful distinction between a societal life-world and a public sphere of political discourse is no longer possible. In his article “Platformisation, Political Change and Democracy in Southeast Asia – for a Labour Turn in Digital Media Studies” he argues for an integrated approach, proposing to take working conditions as a starting point to comprehend of the entanglements between digitalisation, social lifeworlds and politics.

Patrick Keilbart’s article “Mediatised Agricultural TechnoEnvironments in Indonesia. Reimagining Embodied Knowledge and Practice in Technological Environments” analyses imaginaries of cultural modernisation in Indonesia and their mediatisation. Taking the case study of organic agriculture as a case in point, he shows how the embodied practices and knowledges of farmers are reimagined and narrated anew in the digital sphere. Studying imaginaries of organic agriculture by both the government in the form of policy documents and by social movements, he demonstrates how citizens and the state interact through mediatisation, while negotiating visions of organic agriculture online and their embodied knowledges. Analysing how Indonesian citizens make use of social media’s participatory potential to create cultural narratives and challenge state policies, his article is situated at the intersection between 1) social media and politics and 2) imaginaries of technoenvironments.

Imaginaries of Technoenvironments

Visions and ideas of how a technology-informed society looks like are frequently expressed in the works of arts and literatures. The arts and literatures help us to imagine worlds to come and to envision alternative ways of being together. Such imaginaries are informed by ideologies, religious or spiritual beliefs, cosmologies as well as ideas of development, and technological progress.

In Southeast Asia national governments enthusiastically embraced the idea of technological progress. Since the 1980s in particular Malaysia and Singapore have embarked on routes to become knowledge societies, and to foster the conversion of governance of people, and territory through technologies (Evers Reference Evers2002). Moreover, Southeast Asia witnessed a shift from labour intensive production in the export-oriented industries to high-tech driven industries. In the 1980s and 1990s, Malaysia most prominently placed investments and development of high-technology, especially in Information and Computer Technology (ICT), on the political agenda, the so-called “Vision 2020”. This way forward had implications way beyond the political and economic sphere and surfaced in the arts and literatures as well, particularly in the upcoming genre of science fiction embraced by the youth. In his contribution entitled “Malaysian Science Fiction in the Mahathir Era (1981-2003): From ‘Knowledge Society’ to “Lingkungan Teknikal” (Technoenvironments)?”, Arndt Graf examines several of these textual scientific and technical imaginaries, including the novel Panrita by Arena Wati (Reference Wati1993), as well as popular science fiction novels. In these narrations technology was to assist the achievement of a higher moral and spiritual state of both individuals and society at large. The stories presented reveal how imaginaries of technological progress were deeply entangled with those about spiritual worlds known in Islam. Anchoring his analysis in literary texts written in Malay, and produced in a period of government-driven innovation, de-centring away from the Anglosphere, Arndt Graf asks whether the English term of technoenvironments should be localised, proposing the Malay term “lingkungan teknikal”, while drawing on Malay scholarship, such as “teknoteks” (Sohaimi Abdul Aziz Reference Aziz2013).

While Arndt Graf focuses on the evolvement of imaginaries of technoenvironments, or lingkungan teknikal in the Mahathir era, Patrick Keilbart confronts the more recent production of government imaginaries of organic agriculture in Indonesia with ideas of civil society actors and their visions of organic agriculture. Naturally, Southeast Asia’s economic development and technological advancement is subject to scrutiny by civil society. In various countries, civil society actors have and keep on claiming the improvement of working conditions, livelihoods, while calling to reduce environmental pollution, and protect the natural environment. These visions and counter-imaginaries again are circulated, shared and contested in different media, as demonstrated in the last section on social-ecological technoenvironments.

Social-ecological Technoenvironments

Technoenvironments describe newly evolving social-ecological materialities connected to technology in environmental transformations in SEA. Technological change and progress have been embraced by many Southeast Asian nations since the 1970s. However, we have now reached a point in time where adverse effects with regard to the degradation of soils, waters, climate change, and biodiversity loss have become clearer than ever. In Indonesia and Vietnam, this has resulted in a heightened awareness of how to create habitable and liveable places in rural and urban areas for humans and more-than-humans.

Against this backdrop, Martina Padmanabhan and Sandra Kurfürst deliberate through the lens of technoenvironments on contemporary expressions of human to more-than-human interactions in Southeast Asia. Technoenvironments are understood as evolving networks that bind non-animate and animate life together and are shaped by mutual agency, care, and resistance. In their article “Between the Mountains and the Sea: Performative Approaches to Human and More-than-Human-Relations in Technoenvironments in Indonesia and Vietnam” they compare case studies in Indonesia and Vietnam to explore the potential of performative practices to express and shape understandings of the co-becoming of humans and other-than-humans. A productivist understanding of the environment as a resource shaped by the political structures constitutes technoenvironments in Vietnam as well as in Indonesia, though each in a peculiar way (Ehlert and Padmanabhan Reference Ehlert and Padmanabhan2025). Technoenvironments are both an ethical and political shift in thinking about progress and the future.

As already discussed by Patrick Keilbart above, technoenvironments are mediated when the online and the offline world meet at the very site of performative protests. Trees, plants, seeds and soil become agents in the performative representation of people’s entanglements with their more-than-human environment thus extending the public sphere to include more-than-human actors in (potentially) policy making, as the precondition for the creation of liveable cities and societies.

In his article “Living with Floods: Applying the Adversity Acceptance as Resilience Framework to Flood Management Practices in Hoi An Ancient Town” Nguyen Ky Nam shows how floods have been woven into a town’s identity, illustrating how socio-ecological transformations appear as opportunities for cultural sustainability. He draws on adversity acceptance, which focuses on peoples’ ability to comprehend, acknowledge, and adapt to challenges. People predict the onset and retreat of floods by observing changes in the natural environment, while adaptation to flooding is enhanced by the town’s layout and adaptive architecture, and by the comprehensive measures taken each year to prepare for flooding. This proactive and holistic approach to flood management is deeply rooted in transgenerational knowledge. Digital practices as assemblages of actions and digital technologies connected to social goals and social identities, like weather forecasts and social media now play a significant role in flood management strategies, and floods have been incorporated into the town’s tourism experience.

Outlook

This special issue demonstrates, how technoenvironments as evolving networks that bind non-animate and animate life together, shaped by mutual agency, care, and resistance, produce powerful forms of making the earth habitable for some, and less so for others. The notion of technoenvironments offers a productive angle to investigate habitability as the conditions under which human and non-human life can persist and flourish on a changing planet. With an outspoken intersectional and culturally informed perspective, technoenvironments enable a contingent understanding towards differentiated planetary well-being.

Thus, technoenvironments in Southeast Asia help to conceptualise and observe interlocking material, political and technological transformations through social media and politics, imaginaries and hybrid socionatures. By embedding our research in the cosmologies of Southeast Asia informed by its situatedness between the mountains and the sea, we would like to propose the following questions for future research on technoenvironments: What cultural repertoires are available to place humans between the mountains and the sea? How can art-based and transdisciplinary practice contribute to future research on technoenvironments? Whose knowledge counts as representation and whose is ignored?

For this by no means final research programme, we envisage applying a transdisciplinary approach. We understand transdisciplinarity as utilising different disciplinary bodies of knowledge, in the sense of interdisciplinarity, while integrating non-academic actors and their knowledges fully into the research process (Padmanabhan Reference Padmanabhan and Padmanabhan2018). These include knowledges derived from practices of farmers and policy makers, but also the tacit and embodied knowledge of more-than-human lifeworlds. To grasp these imaginaries of alternative more-than-human relations the workshop model of performance art holds promises to gain embodied knowledge through art-based-research (Padmanabhan Reference Padmanabhanunder review). We perceive these many ways of being, speaking and knowing as constitutive for adequate problem description and finding more sustainable ways forward. Thus, transdisciplinary knowledge production ideally involves co-design with affected constituencies and co-creation in the context of technoenvironments.