KC Legacion on Degrowth, Technology and Social Media

KC Legacion is a Master of Environmental Studies candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. His research presents a reimagined understanding of social media through the lens of degrowth—this project will culminate in a short film set to premiere in September of this year. Outside of their research, KC is a team member of the web collective degrowth.info and a member of a nascent housing cooperative in West Philadelphia.

"There's actually an entire subfield of degrowth scholarship that's called degrowth and technology, which looks at technology's role in these sociological transformations pursued by degrowthers.

My master's research focuses on looking at social media through a degrowth lens. Specifically, I'm using concepts in the literature called "conviviality", which was first formulated by Ivan Illich, an Austrian-born priest, critic, and philosopher who wrote a number of texts in the 1970s that sharply analyzed industrial ways of life...I collected data on six social media, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, Decidim, Mastodon, and iNaturalist, and I'm using this lens of conviviality to analyze the different components of social media.”

www.degrowth.info

www.kclegacion.com

www.decidim.org

www.joinmastodon.org

www.iNaturalist.org

www.oneplanetpodcast.org

www.creativeprocess.info