Nephele: Clouds, Care, Democracy

Nephele: Clouds, Care, Democracy takes as its point of departure the elusive figure of Nephele, the cloud nymph of Greek mythology whose fleeting appearances remain peripheral to canonical narratives and dominant political imaginaries. Atmospheric, transient, and resistant to stable embodiment, Nephele offers a lens through which to rethink ecological relations, the politics of care, and democratic life in an age of climate catastrophe and digital mediation. From the elemental cloud to the digital cloud, the lecture traces how infrastructures of atmosphere, information, and perception shape political life and its economies of care. Clouds connect and obscure, disperse and concentrate; the digital cloud promises openness while producing new forms of enclosure, informational asymmetry, and epistemic fragmentation, conditions increasingly exploited by illiberal democracies. Bringing elemental cosmologies into conversation with care feminism and democratic theory, the lecture asks what connects atmospheric interdependence, digital infrastructures, and the unequal labors through which collective life is sustained. Climate destruction, extraction, and digital accumulation depend on racialized and gendered distributions of labor, exposure, disposability, attention, and care. The apparent intangibility of the cloud can thus obscure the bodies, environments, and labors that make connection possible while bearing its costs. The lecture asks whether democracy might be reimagined through care: not simply as an ethical response to crisis, but as a political practice of maintenance, responsibility, and interdependence through which collective worlds are sustained.