This special issue of Somatechnics: Journal of Bodies – Technologies – Power is an invitation to critically interrogate how our everyday technological, social, and embodied experience of organisation as a traveling concept (Bal 2002) and socio-material (Orlikowski 2007) production of reality, can generate new modes of organising and being and nonbeing organised. The articles in this special issue span across the humanities, social sciences, performing arts, and critical management studies, to trouble the concept of organisation by de-organising it and the manner in which it has traditionally been instrumentalised and put to use in modern-day organisational theory and practice. Somatechnics presents a thoroughly multi-disciplinary scholarship on the body, providing a space for research that critically engages with the ethico-political implications of a wide range of practices and techniques. The term ‘somatechnics’ indicates an approach to corporeality which considers it as always already bound up with a variety of technologies, techniques and technics, thus enabling an examination of the lived experiences engendered within a given context, and the effects that technologies, technés and techniques have on embodiment, subjectivity and sociality.
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Over the last years a large growth in Electric Vehicles (EV) and charging infrastructure (CI) development has been observed. Particularly in metropolitan areas this growth has led to a system in which multitudes of interactions between EV users take place. While many researchers have focused on EV user charging behavior and deployment strategies for CI, little attention has been paid to conceptualizing the problem domain. This research provides a brief overview of complex systems theory, and derives six characterizing elements of complex systems that may be applicable for CI. The paper investigates both theoretically but also empirically how these characterizing elements apply for CI and provides implications for the further roll-out of CI for both policy makers and researchers. We illustrate our findings with preliminary results form ongoing research. Recommendations include the further development of simulation tools that are capable of exploring effects of e.g. non-linear behavior, feedback loops and emergence of new patterns on CI performance. In the end this paper aims to provide directions to enable policy makers to be better prepared for the anticipated exponential growth of EVs and CI.
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