Sustainability and complexity: Knowledge and authority in the digital humanities

Abstract Concepts of sustainability touch every aspect of scholarly work and are particularly urgent in thinking about those practices that depend on digital technology. The costs of digital scholarship are frequently posed in terms of human labor and rights abuses, ecological and environmental damage, carbon footprints, waste of resources associated with obsolescence, and other issues that affect every stage of the lifecycle of production. But sustainability also needs to be understood as an epistemic concept embedded in complex systems, not merely as a set of problems to be solved through instrumental means applied to operational logistics. This article addresses mechanistic approaches to sustainability, while suggesting that the complexity of the concept of sustainability requires the humanistic methods and ethical principles to be engaged in decisions about future practices in pedagogy, research, and institutional sites.