The biennial International Conference on Communities & Technologies (C&T) is the premier international forum for stimulating debate and disseminating research on the complex connections between communities – in their multiple forms – and information and communication technologies. C&T is brought to you by EUSSET, the European Society for Socially Embedded Systems, who also brings you ECSCW.
With this theme we aim to bring scholars, researchers and practitioners together to explore what hope can do in a time of overlapping socio-ecological crises, conflict, and war. As philosopher Byung-Chul Han suggests, hope emerges in moments of fear and uncertainty. But while fear can isolate us, hope connects us. It helps us reject the given and face the unknown together.
Hope prompts us to imagine new possibilities for the future: our collective utopias that keep us moving forward, as Eduardo Galeano puts it. It is hope that keeps those utopian horizons in view, grounding imagination in action and allowing us to build more just and plural worlds together. Hope is therefore not abstract or naive. Rooted in lived experiences, it grows out of struggle and everyday life. As Paulo Freire writes, hope is a “human necessity” that pushes us to question injustice and work toward change. Without hope, struggle cannot continue; without action, hope loses its meaning.
Positioned at the intersection of communities and technology, the 13th edition of this conference aims at moving beyond both techno-optimism and techno-pessimism. It challenges overly optimistic framings that promote technology as the primary or sole solution to socio-ecological challenges, while also examining how such narratives emerge from corporate agendas that sideline community realities. The conference brings attention to the far-reaching impacts of technology: on communities who use it, from youth participation in social media to app-based workers, and on those affected by its development, from resource extraction sites to the labour behind training AI systems.
At the same time, while confronting the negative impacts of technology, the conference resists slipping into techno-pessimism. Instead, it highlights alternative pathways to technology use and development by centring grassroots, community-led innovation and practices that contest, reclaim and repurpose technology in ways that genuinely empower communities.
Moving beyond techno-optimism and techno-pessimism means centring hope in the debates of technology and communities. Hope is understood here as something we do together rather than just feel: a shared practice of commitment, resistance, and action. In this way, we also understand community as “being in common”, constituting a collective body with shared subjectivity or shared practices.
The theme Communities of Hope, therefore, highlights the many ways people and communities engage with technology to generate and sustain hope: whether through participation, care, creativity, futuring, visioning, innovation, co-design, resistance, or collective organising.
