How was digital capacity understood during the time when digitalization mostly concerned the future rather than the present, is the central question of this research project. The project explores the recent history of the idea of digital capacity. In this way, it provides new perspectives for understanding the current powerful idea, in which citizens are assumed to develop digital skills. From the perspectives of critical disability studies and crip theory, the project both interrogates the centrality of capacity around digitalization and pays attention to how disability has played a part in the history of digital capacity. The data consists of policy documents, TV commercials of technology companies, and scientific texts from the era of cybernetics. Previously, Touko Vaahtera (2022) has interrogated the centrality of capacity in the cultural meanings of bodies in their book "Biopolitics of Swimming and the Re-articulation of Able-Bodiedness: Bodies of Latent Potential".

2023

2027