Minna Vigren

I'm Assistant Professor of Global Communications and Climate Change at LUT University, Finland. I'm a scholar in digital sustainability, with a research focus on alternative futures, the environmental footprint of digital technologies and lifestyles, and themes of imagination, power, and resistance. My interdisciplinary work combines material media studies, critical software and algorithm studies, science and technology studies, human-computer interaction, radical pedagogics, and futures studies.

I completed my Ph.D. in 2020 at Tampere University, with a thesis examining imaginaries of agency within digitalized society. In the thesis, I examined how understandings of human agency and the technologically mediated everyday life entwine in the ‘landscapes of code’. I asked how imaginaries of one’s own agency and that of others are constructed and how societal power structures and arrangements are produced, reproduced, and possibly challenged in the processes of constructing imaginaries of agency. The four empirical cases studies explored the narrative construction on an ideal citizen in The Digital Agenda for Europe, the pre-domestication of Google Glass in Finnish media, the negotiations of the infrastructural power of platforms by Facebook users and non-users, and the experiential landscapes of connective everyday life of avid social media users. 

In the current research project, Imagining Sustainable Digital Futures: Outlines for Eco-Digital Citizenship(Research Council of Finland 2022-2025), I study the environmental unsustainability of our digitalized society and develops methods to imagine alternative futures. Digitalization and technology have often been put forward as solutions to address the planetary crises. Nevertheless, the latest technologies, such as artificial intelligence, are only partial and perhaps misleading solutions if their sustainability is not addressed. The core of the project are experiments in which art-based methods are used to imagine sustainable digital futures. These include, for example, workshops with generative AI, creative writing, and design fiction. The project has been organizing Alternative Futures movie series in spring and autumn 2024 at Turku Book Café together with Cultural Interaction Researcher Network (Kultva).  As part of the project, a repair café has been initiated in Turku in the winter 2024. The main event of the project, Sustainable Digital Everyday Life theme week was organised in May 2024 in Turku. 

Before starting at LUT, I have worked at the departments of computer science at Aalto University and at Stockholm University, as well as in the faculty of Social Sciences at University of Helsinki.