Rawabet Conference Series

Southern Digitalities

March 15 - 16, 2023 | Northwestern University in Qatar

Presented by the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at Northwestern University in Qatar

While the Internet’s Western origins continue to shape our imagination of digital technologies, a decisive shift in the global digital center of gravity compels us to reconsider how we understand digital life, its tools, experiences, and articulations. Today, Chinese platforms rival US social media companies, and viral videos or memes are as likely to emerge in Doha or Delhi, Seoul, or Lagos than New York or Paris. Ghana, Costa Rica, and Sri Lanka have more cell phones than inhabitants, exchanging data at unprecedented rates. Tanzanian, Chilean, or Chinese lithium and rare earth minerals power up devices the world over, linking digital users from Buenos Aires to Ulan Bator, to sites of extraction in the Global South. Though emerging digital technologies outside “the West” have often been framed by the lack, or promises, of leapfrogs, liberation, or biometric security, digital infrastructures have also reproduced or enhanced colonial legacies and reinforced geopolitical, racial, gender, class, caste, or religious hierarchies. Against this backdrop, Southern Digitalities convenes a global community of scholars under the auspices of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at Northwestern University in Qatar, to grapple with these questions: What can we learn about “the digital” by taking seriously digital practices, experiences, and infrastructures in the so- called Global South, where the digital majority lives? What ways of knowing that could enable a deeper and more contextually embedded grasp of the digital have been suppressed or concealed? What forms of identity, belonging, and solidarity, do Southern Digitalities foster? What kinds of labor and production do they constrain and enable? How does the rise of datafication, surveillance, and activism recast the idea and ideal of justice? How do we capture, theorize, and render distinctive experiences of digitality in the Global South?

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Program

Wednesday, March 15, 2023

Dean’s Global Forum

1:00 – 2:30 p.m.

Gita Manaktala 
Editorial Director
MIT Press

Biography

Gita Manaktala is editorial director of the MIT Press, a publisher of scholarship at the intersection of the arts, sciences, and technology. Known for intellectual daring and distinctive design, MIT Press books push the boundaries of knowledge in fields from architecture and contemporary art to the physical and life sciences, computing, economics, environmental studies, engineering, mathematics, linguistics, media studies, and STS. Gita’s own acquisitions are in the areas of information science and communication. Until 2009, she served as the press’s marketing director with responsibility for worldwide promotion and sales. She has served on the board of directors of the Association of American University Presses and co-chaired its first Diversity and Inclusion Task Force, which led to a standing committee dedicated to Equity, Justice, and Inclusion, which she also co-chaired. She is a member of Beacon Press’s advisory board and is a regular speaker on topics in scholarly communication and publishing.

Marwan M. Kraidy
Dean and CEO, Northwestern University in Qatar

Biography

Marwan M. Kraidy is Dean and CEO of Northwestern University in Qatar, where he recently founded the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South, and the Anthony Shadid Chair in Global Media, Politics and Culture at Northwestern University. A Fellow of the International Communication Association, he was the Founding Director of the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (2013-2020) and Associate Dean for Administration at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. The recipient of Andrew Carnegie, Guggenheim, NEH, ACLS, Woodrow Wilson and NIAS fellowships, Kraidy has published 130+ essays and 13 books, notably Hybridity, or the Cultural Logic of Globalization (Temple UP, 2005),

Reality Television and Arab Politics (Cambridge UP, 2010), which won three leading prizes, and The Naked Blogger of Cairo: Creative Insurgency in the Arab World (Harvard UP 2016), which won three major awards. His current projects focus on digital sovereignty and the elemental politics of extremism, the geopolitics of Turkish television

drama, the aesthetics and politics of music videos, the evolution of political graffiti in the digital era, and the rise of a digital-native news sphere in the Arab world. He is a member of the Board of Directors of the American Council of Learned Societies in New York, the International Advisory Board of the Center for American Studies and Research at the American University of Beirut, and the Board of Advisors of the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He tweets @MKraidy.

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Welcome and Introduction

3:00 - 3:15 p.m.

Marwan M. Kraidy
Dean and CEO, Northwestern University in Qatar
Clovis Bergère
Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South Northwestern University in Qatar

Panel 1: Epistemology

3:15 - 4:45 p.m.

Tanja Bosch
University of Cape Town

Abstract

Epistemic Decolonization of Digital Media (Research) in the Global South

The growth of the mobile internet and the subsequent proliferation of digital platforms in the Global South has raised various issues regarding how researchers approach this so-called digital turn. This paper focuses specifically on ways to reimagine our scholarly approaches to the digital in the context of datafication, algorithmic violence/resistance, and surveillance. Drawing on previous work by Arora (2016, 2019), Milan & Treré (2017), and various others, the paper highlights how people who are not ‘perpetually connected’ use technology in ways that draw meaning from their specific social contexts. This paper expands on existing research from the author and others (Bosch, 2022; Schoon et al., 2020) to explore the ways in which we think about and research digital media in Global South contexts, with reference to examples from the African continent. This includes reflection on the suggestion to position African digital experiences as epistemic sites of knowledge production (Schoon et al., 2020). Moreover, the paper focuses on ways in which scholars could focus on epistemic decolonization to re-center and focus on indigenous knowledge production. How can scholars recalibrate the existing Western knowledge system which guides our research? This paper draws on existing scholarly work to reflect theoretically on ways to de-center the epistemology of media scholarship, highlighting the key idea that “decoloniality requires epistemic disobedience” (Mignolo, 2011).

Biography

Tanja Bosch is associate professor of media studies and production at the Centre for Film and Media Studies, University of Cape Town. She teaches multimedia production, media analysis, and qualitative research methods.Bosch is the current president of the South African Communication Association (SACOMM); and Chairperson of the African Digital Rights Network. Her latest book, Social Media and Everyday Life in South Africa (Routledge, 2021), explores how South Africans use social media apps for various aspects of self and group identity formation. She is also the author of Broadcasting Democracy: Radio and Identity in South Africa (HSRC Press, 2017). Bosch’s current research includes an exploration of social media apps both for identity formation and political activism. She also serves on the boards of local radio stations Fine Music Radio and Rx Radio and is an Associate Editor of African Journalism Studies and the Journal of Communication.

Milad Doueihi
Paris Sorbonne

Abstract

The Greedy Masters of Intelligence: Ethics, Computation and Universality

The history of ethics and computing dates back at least to N. Wiener’s God, Golem, Inc. (1966). From “Moral Machines” and “Machine Ethics” to the current debates concerning various forms of “embedded ethics” and the impact of AI and data massification, it is perhaps pertinent to revisit the issue by examining the epistemological relations between computability and ethics in order to postulate a shared set of properties that support their claims to a form of “universality” that shapes identities individual and collective.

In such a context, instead of rehearsing the well-known debates on the impossibility of a consensual definition of Ethics within broad cultural and philosophical traditions, we propose a starting point for our exchange: is it likely that a fundamental form of incompleteness is what made universal computing possible? Can the same be said of Ethics? And if so, how to think of the forms of computational determinism (from the pioneering work of Solomonof to the more recent “No Free Lunch” controversy) as perhaps the site for thinking through ethics and computation, both in legal as well as cultural and ultimately computational terms?

Is there any similarity between the conception of an algorithm and the ways of making laws in the Common Law tradition (a broad set of interpretative guidelines that rely, in both instances, on provisional validation regularly submitted to re-evaluation by taking into account new data)? If so, perhaps a historical perspective can be in this case instructive.

Biography

Milad Doueihi is a historian of religion; formerly co-chair of the Collège des Bernardins and Humanum Chair of Digital Humanism at the Université Paris-Sorbonne (Paris-IV), he founded the Chair of Digital Humanism at the Université Laval. A graduate of Cornell University, he has taught in the United States (Johns Hopkins University), Canada, and the United Kingdom. A theorist of the digital world, he has published widely on the topic. His books include La Grande Conversion Numérique [The Great Digital Conversion] (Seuil, 2008), Pour un Humanisme Numérique [For a Digital Humanism] (Seuil, 2011), and Qu’est-ce que le Numérique? [What is the Digital?] (PUF, 2013).

Eugenia Mitchelstein
Universidad de San Andrés

Abstract

The Football World Cup: Global South Champions, Global North Narratives

During the Argentina vs France final match of the Qatar Football World Cup, there were 25 million messages per second on WhatsApp and over 24 thousand tweets per second. With 32 national teams from five continents, the Word Cup was truly a global event. However, international coverage, both on legacy media and on platforms such as Twitter and TikTok tended to follow Western, specifically American and European, tropes. Despite the promise and potential of digital communication to foster solidarity across the Global South, international communication during the World Cup remained, for the most part, dominated by Western outlooks and debates. This study will critically examine the Twitter and TikTok discussions regarding three topics: Qatari organization of the World Cup and way of life; the ethnic makeup of the Argentine team; and international fandom of the Brazil and Argentine teams. It will argue that due to cultural and structural factors: first, Global North narratives surrounding the World Cup tended to be adopted in the Global North due to long-existing cultural hegemony; second, due to the economic and financial restrictions that Global South media companies and freelance journalists face in expanding their reporting of world events, they rely on coverage by either press agencies or mainstream media from Global North countries, thus hindering South-South Communication and understanding.

Biography

Eugenia Mitchelstein is associate professor and director of the Department of Social Sciences at the University of San Andrés and Co-director of the Center for Studies on Media and Society. She has a degree in Political Science from the University of Buenos Aires, an MS in Media and Communication from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a PhD from the Department of Communication at Northwestern University. Her research agenda examines the interaction between political communication, media, and citizen participation. She has published more than thirty articles in peer-reviewed journals and is co-author of two books, The News Gap: When the Information Preferences of the Media and the Public Diverge (MIT Press, 2013), and The Digital Environment: How We Live, Learn, Work, and Play Now (MIT Press, 2021) and an edited volume. Her current research focuses on mistrust and misinformation during the 2019 presidential campaign in Argentina.

Siva Vaidhyanathan
University of Virginia

Abstract

From Tagore to Habermas: Can the Subaltern Deliberate?

At the dawn of the 21st century it seemed that the principles espoused by Jürgen Habermas in his volumes of work on political philosophy and communication theory had been realized in practice. Europe had almost unified around principles of human rights, open borders, and deliberative democracy. The United States and the Soviet Union had broken their stalemate on their competition to control the Global South. India, Indonesia, and Brazil seemed to consider — if not embrace — a cosmopolitan globalism that considered issues from minority rights to global environmental threats to be issues worth considering as they positioned themselves to ascend in power and influence in the new century. Digital technologies and global networks had dropped the marginal cost of communication close to zero, fostering hopes that communicative rationality, the alleviation of information maldistribution, and the prospects for the strengthening of deliberative norms would allow human flourishing in ways hardly imagined a decade earlier. Now, a quarter of the way through that century, few of those beliefs seem stable even in Europe and North America. Human rights, open borders, and deliberative democracy once again demand a re-articulation and re-examination if they are to be promoted. In the Global South, where those notions rarely seemed to apply as much more than a veneer for imperial and neoliberal hubris, the challenge is even more steep. This paper forges space — and hope -- at the intersection of the work of Tagore, Habermas, Arendt, Warner, Fraser, Anderson, Appadurai, and Kraidy. It argues for a new spirit of deliberative democracy that can be adopted and improvised from below, instead of installed from above. In doing so, the paper argues for a “rhythm of democracy,” a sense of joyful embrace of humanity (and humanities) to lead a re-imagination of a vision of Subaltern democratic flourishing. To do so, we must shift the agenda beyond a critique the structure and function of digital platforms and networks to one that reverse-colonizes them and leverages them to pursue more humanistic potential.

Biography

Siva Vaidhyanathan is the Robertson professor of media studies and director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy (2018), Intellectual Property: A Very Short Introduction (2017), The Googlization of Everything and Why We Should Worry (2011), Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity ( 2001), and The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (2004). He also co-edited (with Carolyn Thomas) the collection, Rewiring the Nation: The Place of Technology in American Studies (2007). Vaidhyanathan is a columnist for The Guardian and has written for many other periodicals, including The New York Times, Wired, American Scholar, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Columbia Journalism Review, Washington Post, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and more. He has appeared on news programs on BBC, CNN, NBC, CNBC, MSNBC, ABC, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central. In 2015 he was portrayed on stage at the Public Theater in a play called Privacy. After five years as a professional journalist, he earned a PhD in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Vaidhyanathan has also taught at Wesleyan University, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Columbia University, New York University, McMaster University, and the University of Amsterdam. He is a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities and a Faculty Associate of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

CHAIR AND RESPONDENT

Marwan M. Kraidy
Dean and CEO, Northwestern University in Qatar

See Biography

Panel 1 - Southern Digitalities

 

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Thursday, March 16, 2023

Panel 2: Belonging

9:00 - 10:45 a.m. 

Heather Jaber
Northwestern University in Qatar

Abstract

Comparison Economies and the Global South: Mobilizing Digital Bahdala Across Lebanese and Egyptian Social Media

This paper explores what I call digital bahdala, a didactic performance and/or the state of ridicule or humiliation which takes place using the affordances and imaginaries of the Internet. It is this didactic function that I identify in several scandals which take place across social media platforms in the context of Lebanon and Egypt’s revolutions and subsequent economic collapses. I explore digital bahdala by examining three YouTubers across Egypt and Lebanon who engage with TikTok content to mobilize discourses and performances of immorality or ‘cringe.’ I offer that they do this by generating comparison economies which operate as the powerhouse of bahdala and its digital manifestation. These economies feature the juxtaposition of embarrassment with a better ideal rooted in notions of propriety, piety, and professionalism, promising social mobility in the context of economic crisis. Although these economies operate differently in Egypt and Lebanon, they highlight the relevance of considering digitality as an articulator of Global South belonging.

Biography

Heather Jaber is assistant professor in residence with a joint appointment across the Communication and Liberal Arts Programs at Northwestern University in Qatar. She received her PhD in Communication from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and holds an MA in Media Studies from the American University of Beirut. Jaber’s research examines digital and popular culture, affect and emotion, and geopolitics. She examines the affects that sustain national imaginaries in the MENA by analyzing digital performances which unsettle or repair them.

Giang Nguyen-Thu
University of Queensland

Between Ritual and Revolution: Digital Dramas in Post- Revolutionary Vietnam

Social dramas have become a digital ritual. But when digital crises are tamed into a daily routine, how can we tell the difference between a banalized drama and a revolutionary moment that cracks open possibilities of an alternative future? This paper draws from online and offline ethnographic fieldwork in Vietnam to explore the recent rise of online activism in the country. It focuses on the case study of the Đồng Tâm event (2017-2020) – a tragic peasant-based land dispute in which a local case of grassroots dissensus was turned into an uncontainable national crisis due to social media. The drama of Đồng Tâm will be compared with other digital dramas happening at the same time frame, which include waves of pandemic outbreaks and a series of political corruption incidents in Vietnam. The paper argues that the revolutionary magnitude of a digital drama depends not on the network itself but on how new media facilitate an attunement between the short temporalities of online publics and the long temporalities of subaltern dissensus. When such a connection is disrupted, political hope remains curtailed by endless crises habituated by the network.

Biography

Giang Nguyen-Thu is research fellow at the Digital Cultures and Societies Hub (DCS), University of Queensland. She obtained her doctorate at the University of Queensland in 2016. From 2018-2020, she worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center of Advanced Research in Global Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. Her book Television in Post-Reform Vietnam: Nation, Media, Market (Routledge, 2019) is the first monograph in English about contemporary Vietnamese media. She has published

articles in Cultural Studies, The Journal of Asian Studies, Feminist Media Studies, and Media International Australia. Her current project explores the lived experience of digital time. She is also interested in cultural memory, especially the reconstruction of the socialist past in now highly globalized and marketized Vietnam.

Jinsook Kim
Emory University

Abstract

#CancelKorea: Nationalist Affects and the Geopolitics of Racism in Postcolonial Asia

This study explores the politics of race and racism in postcolonial Asia by examining the #CancelKorea hashtag on Twitter. The controversy associated with the hashtag began in September 2020 in response to the revelation that the Filipino-American TikTok star Bella Poarch had a tattoo of the rising sun flag, which many Koreans continue to associate with Japanese colonialism, militarism, and war crimes. Even after Poarch apologized and asserted that she had not known the history behind the flag and would remove the tattoo, some Korean users continued to attack her using racial slurs characterizing Filipinos as poor and uneducated. In response, some Filipino users called out Koreans using the hashtag #CancelKorea. The present study analyzes this hashtag and the associated anti-Korean discourse as an example of both the transnational social media phenomenon of cancel culture and the rise of anti-Korean sentiment in the changing geopolitical landscape of postcolonial Asia. I further consider the hashtag as an opportunity for Korean users to reflect on their own racism against Southeast Asians and rethink the racial hierarchy in contemporary South Korean culture. By foregrounding inter-Asian encounters and engagement, this research will interrogate the potential for cross-national dialogues in digital spaces.

Biography

Jinsook Kim is assistant professor in the Department of Film and Media at Emory University. Her research program takes a critical approach to digital media and cultures that involves both identifying the competing forces that make digital media toxic and inhospitable for marginalized groups and accounting for the struggle and labor necessary to render digital space livable. Her work on transnational digital media culture has appeared in peer-reviewed journals, including JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Communication, Culture & Critique, and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. She is currently writing a book about online misogyny and digital feminist activism in the context of contemporary South Korea.

Jian Xiao
Zhejiang University

Abstract

Shaping Subculture in Platforms: Vocaloid in China (co- authored by Tianning She, Zhejiang University)

The Vocaloid as a transnational phenomenon in China has developed along with Otaku subculture originated from Japan. Serving as a technological and musical strategy, it has been gaining popularity with a wide audience in China and suggests a post human society. A method of digital ethnography is applied to understand the Vocaloid proconsumers. By using a user-centered approach, we aim to analyze two questions: first, how proconsumers remain underground songwriters and their resistance towards the developments of technology, especially from the earlier synthesizing applications to the new AI featured period, experiencing a process of authenticating voice and developing an individualistic aesthetics towards it. Second, how the collective production of alternative “China story” is carried out in comparison with the official “China story” as a national propaganda. Through the process of platformization and localization of international popular culture, we argue that a de-westernized approach that considers the local subcultural practices needs to be pursued to understand the new forms of digital subcultures. We hope to answer how the Vocaloid subcultural production keeps challenging notions of voice as revealing something essential about the body, resulting in new expectations of digital human under a specific cultural context, and more importantly, how a subcultural engagement with the voice technologies help us make sense of the intersection of the digital and the human as a site of position to rethink voice and digital human to a global context.

Biography

Jian Xiao (PhD, Loughborough University) is associate professor at Zhejiang University. She is a board member of Association for Cultural Studies (ACS), and has published widely in domestic and international journals. She has also published a monograph titled Punk Culture in Contemporary China with Palgrave Macmillan. Her research interests focus on urban cultural studies and digital culture.

Sulafa Zidani
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Abstract

All Your Memes are Belong to Us: Multilinguistic Memes and Belonging in the “Global” World

Although internet memes are a global phenomenon, a closer look at meme content and flows shows that meme culture remains dominated by cultural logics and production from the United States. This paper discusses the tensions in the global flows of digital culture, whereby meme makers may identify a belonging to global US-dominated meme culture but do not feel represented by it. Based on interviews with meme makers and analysis of multilinguistic meme content, the paper unpacks how, on one hand, American meme and popular culture strongly dominates the directions and contents of cultural flows and on the other hand, multilinguistic meme makers paradoxically use this content to create memes that insert their own voices and experiences into these flows. Multilinguistic meme makers create content with their languages, the cultural production of their choosing, and their everyday experiences, creating content in their own voice that mixes languages and cultures. In this way, multilinguistic meme makers interrupt the global flows of meme culture by making content that is niche and inaccessible. The paper thus reflects on the opportunities and caveats of representation/self-representation in digital culture, as well as the limitations of power under the economic system of digital globalization.

Biography

Sulafa Zidani is a writer, speaker, and educator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she is assistant professor of global civic media. Her work explores global creative practices in online civic engagement across geopolitical contexts and languages. She is currently working on a book-length study focusing on how meme creators navigate transnational politics on the multilingual internet. Zidani has published on online culture mixing, Arab and Chinese media politics, and critical transnational pedagogy in venues such as: Social Media + Society; Information, Communication & Society; International Journal of Communication, and others. Outside of the academy, Zidani is
an accomplished public educator. As a facilitator for the Seachange Collective, she has led workshops on antiracism and social justice for organizations such as NowThis, Gimlet Media, The Onion, and The Writers Guild of America. Her public writing on popular culture and politics has appeared in Arabic and Anglophone publications.

Chair

Leila Tayeb
Northwestern University in Qatar

Biography

Leila Tayeb is assistant professor in residence with a joint appointment in the Communication and Liberal Arts Programs at Northwestern University in Qatar. She received her PhD in performance studies from Northwestern University and holds an MA in performance studies from NYU and an MA in international affairs from The New School. Prior to joining Northwestern Qatar, Tayeb held postdoctoral appointments at NYU Abu Dhabi and Cornell University. Tayeb’s research and teaching interests are in performance and politics, sound and militarism in daily life, dance studies, Islam and the state, and state-sponsored performance. Her work spans MENA and Africana studies with a central focus in Libya.

RESPONDENT

Clovis Bergère
Northwestern University in Qatar

Biography

Clovis Bergère is assistant director for research at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at Northwestern University Qatar. He previously worked at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also completed a postdoctoral fellowship. His research examines the politics of youth in Guinea, West Africa, with a focus on digital media and urban life. In addition, he has also written on street corners as key nodes of urban life and politics in Guinea. He holds a PhD in Childhood Studies from Rutgers University-Camden (2017) and has taught at Rutgers University in Camden, the University of the Arts, and the University of Pennsylvania. His work has appeared in the International Journal of Communication, African Studies Review, the Journal of Childhood Studies, and American Anthropologist, as well as several edited volumes. Prior to returning to academia in 2011, he worked as a project manager in Children’s Services in London, where he oversaw the building over thirty playgrounds and youth centers, focused on natural play and collaborative design.

 

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Panel 3: Work 

11:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.

Seyram Avle
University of Massachusetts

Abstract

Locating the Datafication of the Everyday in Africa

Africa has seen a rise in internet use, in part due to the lowering cost of data, greater 3G and 4G coverage, and a wide array of low-cost devices from China. With this increased use comes encounters with what has been characterized, variously, as platform/surveillance capitalism and digital/data colonialism. While such notions are useful frames for describing the broader relationship between African digital ecologies and the global systems they fit in, they are also partial accounts as they largely elide place-based digital practices in and from the global south. In this paper, I map the configurations of hardware, software, institutional actors, and activities that generate and extract data from users on behalf of both state and non-state actors in Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria. I put these in conversation with an analysis of the data protections available in those countries to 1) reflect on how the datafication of the everyday unfolds in Africa, and 2) showcase how extant accounts of digitality in the Global South might better pinpoint place-based vulnerabilities and their possible solutions.

Biography

Seyram Avle is assistant professor of global digital media in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research focuses on digital technology cultures and innovation across Africa, China, and the United States. This work primarily takes a critical approach towards understanding how digital technologies are made and used, as well as their implications for issues of labor, identity, and futures.

Ergin Bulut
Koç University

Abstract

Drama Production goes Digital: Pragmatist and Critical Modes of Hope in Turkey’s Platformized Drama Industry

For creative workers in Turkey’s transnational drama industry, digital platforms promise hopeful spaces of employment, entrepreneurialism, and creative storytelling outside the scope of the industry’s gatekeepers and the state’s disciplinary gaze. Based on ethnographic research and interviews with Turkey’s creative drama workers, I examine the platformization of drama production through the concept of hope. I ask: when, why, and in what ways do hopes flourish? How and when do hopes collapse? How do creative drama workers hope as they persist in producing creative work despite corporate and political pressures? Investigating what hope does, for whom, and under what circumstances, I diagnose two different modes of hoping: pragmatist and critical. I call for grasping hope as a present-oriented and ordinary notion as opposed to its futuristic and grandiose connotations or its definitions as an internal trait and wishful thinking against the odds. Reframing hope in more modest and ambivalent terms where it can be both co-opted and transformative in creative production, I aim to dewesternize hope within the highly Euro-American field of media industry studies.

Biography

Ergin Bulut works as associate professor at Koç University’s Media and Visual Arts Department. He researches in the areas of political economy of media and cultural production, videogame studies, and philosophy of technology. He is the author of A Precarious Game: The Illusion of Dream Jobs in the Video Game Industry (Cornell UP, 2020). His work has been published in journals including Media, Culture & Society, Triple C, International Journal of Communication, Communication, Culture and Critique, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Television and New Media, Communication and Critical-Cultural Studies.

Joe Khalil
Northwestern University in Qatar

Abstract

Forgotten Histories of the Digital in the Middle East

The story of the digital ‘revolution’ in the Middle East has been told often enough for a consensus to take hold about the empowering and transformative potential of fast-changing digital technologies. That the Middle East did not experience digital transformation uniformly and systematically is often obscured in these narratives. A critical engagement with the more extended history of the region’s encounter with technology requires that we sharpen our analytical tools: What historical junctures shaped the development of the digital Middle East? What lessons can we draw from the state, market, and public’s reactions to the introduction of previous technologies to the region? Should countries with the highest diffusion of ICT technologies be considered in the same geopolitical grouping as countries with the lowest internet penetration? Engaging with the Middle East’s digital histories provides an entry point for dissecting overlapping and complex dynamics beyond facile analyses often mired in technological determinism. Such undertaking calls for the need to go beyond analytical perspectives which either essentialize or homogenizes its diverse trajectories. By adopting a long durée approach that helps eschew the pitfalls of presentism, this contribution provides a spatiotemporal anchorage for examining complex and interrelated dynamics associated with how information communication technologies are introduced, deployed, and used.

Biography

Joe F. Khalil is associate professor of communication at Northwestern University in Qatar. His works include The Digital Double Bind (with Mohamed Zayani, Oxford University Press); The Handbook of Media and Culture in the Middle East (Blackwell-Wiley); Culture, Time, and Publics in the Arab World (with Tarik Sabry); Arab Television Industries (with Marwan Kraidy); Arab Satellite Entertainment Television and Public Diplomacy; and numerous scholarly articles.

Mohamed Zayani
Georgetown University in Qatar

 

Biography

Mohamed Zayani is professor of critical theory at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar. His works include The Digital Double Bind (with Joe F. Khalil, Oxford University Press); Digital Middle East (Oxford University Press); Networked Publics and Digital Contention (Oxford University Press,); and The Culture of Al Jazeera (McFarland).

Cheryll Soriano
De La Salle University

Abstract

Between Agency and Precarity: Relational Practices in Platform Labor

The digital in platform labor has often been explored through the lens of automated systems of control over workers. This paper examines ‘digitality’ in platform-mediated organization of work through the lens of the relational infrastructures that labor platformization both builds on and reinforces. Drawing from a digital ethnography on the working conditions among cloudworkers in the Philippines, one of the top suppliers of labor in the platform economy globally, I examine the situated power relationships that cloudworkers navigate and negotiate in the everyday – with foreign clients and with other workers – that construct the simultaneous articulation of agency and precarity in the platform economy. Characterized by affect and creativity, these are situated in the dynamics of inequality and postcoloniality, where workers’ relational practices are situated in asymmetrical global power relations between buyers and suppliers of labor, as well as in platform labor imaginaries and hierarchies among workers that is shaped by class. The organizing logics of labor platformization compel workers to negotiate critical social and economic capital to work their way through the controls and constraints of platform-mediated organization of work; and these everyday negotiations consequently allow labor platforms to sustain their relevance.

Biography

Cheryll Soriano is professor in the Department of Communication, De La Salle University Manila. She has made scholarly interventions in the intersections of digital media and platformization, cultural production, and social justice in postcolonial settings. She is currently involved in global, regional, and national research networks examining the embeddedness of platforms and their social implications,
including Fairwork (where she is Principal Investigator for the Philippines) and Platform Ecosystems and Transactional Cultures in Asia (an eight-country Australian Research Council project where she leads the Philippines research). She sits in the Editorial Boards of key journals in communication and media studies. She is author of Philippine Digital Cultures: Brokerage Dynamics on YouTube (Amsterdam University Press, 2022) and co-edited Asian Perspectives on Digital Culture: Emerging Phenomena, Enduring Concepts (Routledge, 2018).

CHAIR

Marcela Pizarro
Northwestern University in Qatar

Biography

Marcela Pizarro is assistant professor in residence at Northwestern University Qatar. She worked as a journalist for Al Jazeera English since its launch in 2006. At the channel’s media critique show, The Listening Post, she made programs on the politics, history, and culture of media around the world. Her reports, documentaries, and animations incorporate cultural theory into her journalism. Her academic work focuses on the politics of media in the global south, Latin American cultural history, and south-south intellectual history. At NU-Q she lectures in broadcast journalism, international news, and documentary with a special interest in bringing theories of race, gender and class into creative forms of journalistic practice. She was awarded the British Academy scholarship for her PhD in Latin American cultural history at the University of London.

RESPONDENT

Siva Vaidhyanathan
University of Virginia

See Biography

 

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Panel 4: Data 

1:30 - 3:00 p.m.

Marc Owen Jones
Hamad Bin Khalifa University

Abstract

Beyond Grand Theory: Un-Reifying Data Colonialism(s) with Data Ethnographies of Digital Violence

The concept of ‘data colonialism’ (Couldry and Mejias, 2018) refers to how data relations and datafication enable the extraction and exploitation of datafied subjects by entities such as ‘Big Tech’, ‘The West’, and China. While useful, the concept has been critiqued for being predicated on the extractive process and lacking attention to decolonial epistemic concerns (Mumford, 2022). The reductionist view of a bipolar order between the ‘West’ and ‘China’ overlooks the complex and contested network ecologies of power. Furthermore, the concept’s reification risks erasing practical constraints, conflicts, and local forms of opposition that exist within networked ecologies. An antidote to such grand theorizing involves methodological approaches that highlight the networked ecology’s intricacies and make connections among actors evident within specific cases. The paper uses case studies in Myanmar, Kenya, and the Middle East to demonstrate how ‘assemblages,’ supply chains of digital power, emerge as new nodes of power within a data ecology. These assemblages span across global north-south divides, indicating the existence of key nodes of power that do not simply fall within a digital cold war paradigm. The use of data for the execution of digital violence through surveillance and repression highlights the dangers of conflating data appropriation with colonialism. Therefore, a nuanced approach to understanding the complex assemblages of power in the networked ecology of data is necessary to avoid reification of the term.

Biography

Marc Owen Jones is associate professor of Middle East studies at Hamad bin Khalifa University, where he lectures and researches on digital repression and informational control strategies. His recent work has focused on social media disinformation and harassment in the Middle East, but he has written on media and informational controls, revolutionary cultural production, digital misogyny, and digital propaganda. He completed his PhD in Government and International Affairs at Durham University, which won the 2016 best thesis award from AGAPS (MESA). Among his various publications are two monographs, Political Repression in Bahrain, publish by Cambridge University, Press (2020), and Disinformation and Deception in the Middle East, published with Hurst Books and Oxford University Press (2022). Jones is also a non-resident fellow at Democracy for the Arab World Now and the Middle East Council for Global Affairs.

Admire Mare
University of Johannesburg

Abstract

Disrupting the Centre: Situating and Theorizing Southern Digitalities in the Context of Decolonization

Digital platforms are not neutral techno-social infrastructures. They are predominantly shaped by social forces and power relations. Even more important, they are imbued with values, biases, and societal visions of their designers and creators. This article seeks to situate and theorize Southern digitalities using emergent digital lives in selected African contexts as a lens to understand and analyze its evolution, articulations, and implications within the global digital center of gravity. Africa provides an important locus of enunciation to tease out Southern digitalities because of its location within global surveillance capitalist relations. Besides providing some of the rare earth minerals that power up digital devices and platforms across the world, Africa continues to be peripheralized as a site of extraction, exploitation, oppression, and experimentation. The article goes beyond the usual technological solutionism that has accompanied the marketing of digital technologies in Africa by foregrounding the reproduction, reconfiguration, and reinforcement of colonial legacies, geopolitical, racial, gender, class, ethnic and religious hierarchies. It also problematizes the immersion of Africa in the global surveillance capitalist relations. Besides unpacking structural harms and unfreedoms accompanying the datafication and platformization of the world, this article proposes a data or platform justice model rooted in human rights and contextually appropriate cultural sensibilities.

Biography

Admire Mare is associate professor in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. His research interests include analyzing the intersection between technology and society, digital journalism, social media and politics, media and democracy, political communication, digital campaigns, digital diplomacy, platformization of news work, media and conflict, media start-ups and innovation and artificial intelligence in resource-constrained in newsrooms. He currently leads the international research project ‘Social Media, Misinformation and Elections in Kenya and Zimbabwe’ (SoMeKeZi) funded by the Social Science Research Council (2019-2023). He is the co-author of Participatory Journalism in Africa Digital News Engagement and User Agency in the South (Routledge, 2021 with Hayes Mawindi Mabweazara) and Digital Surveillance in Southern Africa: Policies, Politics and Practices (Springer, 2022 with Allen Munoriyarwa). He is also the co-editor of Media, Conflict and Peacebuilding in Africa: Empirical and Conceptual Considerations (Routledge, 2021 with Jacinta Maweu), as well as Teaching and Learning with Digital Technologies in Higher Education Institutions in Africa: Case Studies from a Pandemic Context (Routledge, 2023 with Erisher Woyo and Elina Amadhila).

Fernanda Rosa
Virginia Tech University

Abstract

Materializing “Something called BGP routing,” or Ways to Decolonize an Internet Protocol

On October 4, 2021, Facebook services, including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, went down for approximately six hours. Forbes reported a loss of $5.9 billion in the company’s shares and Wired vaguely explained the outage was related to “something called BGP routing.” While it is not possible to know exactly what caused Facebook’s outage, as the company’s memos were not technically informative, the public causes can be traced with the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). BGP is the language that internet networks use to communicate. Through BGP, network routers “speak” to each other, as interviewees and technical documents explain. BGP is code that works as language, connecting coders, devices, users, and the environment. This paper problematizes the universalistic materialism that structures contemporary approaches to understanding technology and governance by applying a decolonial lens to BGP. It does that through code ethnography (Rosa, 2022), which allows scholars to enroll code into research, questioning how this supposedly universal language brings with it hegemony and power, and the consequences of it for the Global South. Beyond its visibility in the face of the fall of stock markets, BGP addressed as language will show how the grammar of code embeds colonial patterns and inequalities that shape the infrastructure for information circulation in the internet.

Biography

Fernanda R. Rosa is assistant professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech. Her work is focused on internet governance and design, social justice, and the Global South. In her second and ongoing book project, she uses a novel method defined as code ethnography, and transdisciplinary lens founded on science and technologies studies, decolonial and feminist studies, to shed light on the power relations embedded in the information circulation infrastructure of the internet, and the way that our data circulates online. Some of her publications appear at Information, Communication & Society, Policy & Internet, Qualitative Sociology, and Social Media + Society.

Emiliano Treré
Cardiff University

Abstract

Ten Provocations around the Decolonization of Data Studies

Decolonial and post-colonial theories have been recently embraced by critical data and artificial intelligence (AI) scholars to account for the colonial mechanisms of power that traverse contemporary data relations and explain processes of data extraction and exploitation. This area of research signals the growing significance of viewing the impact of data dynamics through the critical lens of coloniality, decolonial and post-colonial theory. However, in order to avoid what sociologist Leon Moosavi has called the ‘decolonial bandwagon and the dangers of intellectual decolonization,’ in this intervention I reflect on the key challenges and dangers of decolonization in relation to datafication and data studies. Building (among others) on Moosavi (2020), Pappas (2017), and Amrute (2019), I thus foreground ten provocations to unsettle and move forward the current debate around the decolonization of data and data studies. I illustrate the enormous difficulties in separating intellectual perspectives and traditions, the tendency to romanticize knowledge from the Global South, and the risk that coloniality may colonize all other categories of analysis of concrete injustices. I conclude by highlighting the need for decolonial approaches to critically engage with these challenges strengthening the dialogue with other conceptual lenses in pragmatic, flexible and humble ways considering the socio-cultural context at hand.

Biography

Emiliano Treré is reader in Data Agency and Media Ecologies at Cardiff University’s School of Journalism, Media and Culture (UK). Previously, he was an associate professor at the Autonomous University of Querétaro (Mexico) and a Member of the National System of Mexican Researchers. Treré has published more than 80 publications in 7 languages in peer-reviewed publications. He is a widely cited author in digital activism, critical data studies, and digital disconnection research with a focus on the Global South. He co-founded the ‘Big Data from the South’ Initiative and co-directs the Data Justice Lab. His book Hybrid Media Activism (Routledge, 2019) won the Outstanding Book Award of the ICA Interest Group ‘Activism, Communication and Social Justice’. His latest co-authored book is Data Justice (Sage, 2022). His forthcoming monograph with Tiziano Bonini (MIT Press, 2023) explores how people around the world fight against platform power through practices of algorithmic resistance.

Chair

Claudia Kozman
Northwestern University in Qatar

Biography

Claudia Kozman is assistant professor in residence in journalism at Northwestern University in Qatar. She conducts research on the media coverage of conflict in the Middle East from a comparative perspective, as well as on public opinion and perceptions during political turmoil. Her research on news content from a framing and sourcing perspective also includes a focus on sports in relation to politics. Prior to joining academia, Kozman worked in journalism for 13 years, most of which were in sports, as reporter, editor, producer, and anchor, in print, digital, and broadcast media. During her career, she covered numerous Lebanese, pan-Arab, and Asian sports tournaments, as well as international ones, including the Winter Olympic Games.

Respondent 

Eddy Borges-Rey
Northwestern University in Qatar

Biography

Eddy Borges-Rey is associate professor in residence at Northwestern University in Qatar. His area of academic expertise is digital journalism and emerging media, and his teaching includes courses on mobile journalism, data journalism, and social media for journalists, amongst others. Prior to obtaining an MA and PhD in media and communication from the University of Malaga in Spain, Borges-Rey worked as a broadcast journalist, media producer, and PR practitioner for almost 15 years. Overall, Borges-Rey’s research looks at the interplay between media, technology, and power, particularly around issues in data journalism, critical data, code and algorithm studies, artificial intelligence and automation, mobile journalism, innovation, photojournalism, and data and media literacy. He is co-editor of the edited collection Data Journalism in the Global South (Palgrave), and the book series Palgrave Studies in Journalism and the Global South. Borges-Rey is also the engagement editor of Journalism Practice. His research has been published in journals such as Digital Journalism (Taylor and Francis), Journalism Practice (Taylor and Francis), Journalism (Sage), and Convergence (Sage), amongst others. He has contributed to field-defining publications such as The Routledge Handbook of Developments in Digital Journalism Studies and the second edition of the Data Journalism Handbook.

 

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Panel 5: Infrastructure

3:15 - 4:45 p.m.

Hatim El-Hibri
George Mason University

Abstract

Control as Accumulation: Neom and the Critique of Digital Infrastructure

The public announcements regarding the creation of the city of Neom in Saudi Arabia were accompanied by bold, even fantastic claims about the role of technology in the creation of a smart and green urban future. In addition to scenes of new ways of living, working, and playing, the building and operation of the city were presented as a unique fulfillment of the promises of digital technology and AI. This paper analyzes Neom by situating the place of digital infrastructure in global economies. I argue that megaprojects should be understood in terms of how they allow states to test and build key components of a domestic political economic and clientelist social order in relation to global systems of capital accumulation. By drawing on critical perspectives on infrastructure in the Global South, I show how analyzing the Neom project allows a unique vantage point on the place of discourses of ‘futurity’ in the political economy of technologies of control. I also draw broader theoretical conclusions for how the computational means of the production of space are defined by the contradictions of the inequalities that they help create.

Biography

Hatim El-Hibri is assistant professor of film and media studies at George Mason University, where he is also affiliated with the programs in Cultural Studies and Middle East and Islamic Studies. He earned his PhD in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University, and previously was a faculty member at the Media Studies Program at the American University of Beirut. His first book, Visions of Beirut: The Urban Life of Media Infrastructure, was published by Duke University Press in 2021.

Sebastián Lehuedé
University of Cambridge

Abstract

An Alternative Planetary Future? Data Sovereignty and the Decolonial Option

Data sovereignty has become one of the most influential alternative technological imaginaries. Initially pushed by China and Russia, this framework is seducing a broad range of actors interested in challenging the hegemony of the US in the control of digital data and its infrastructure. Against this backdrop, this article interrogates the alleged transformative character of data sovereignty. Does this framework support an alternative planetary future, or does it involve a mere change of the actors at stake? To answer this question, I examine the formulations of data sovereignty by the Chinese state, the European Union, and the Latin American civil society in light of Walter Mignolo’s decolonial option. The decolonial option gets inspiration from decolonial praxis and aims at enabling polycentric, noncapitalist and nonanthropocentric planetary futures. As I show, there is some degree of alignment between data sovereignty and the decolonial option in the sphere of international politics, but less so in the world economy and the environment. While in some areas the Chinese and European formulations can exacerbate coloniality, the Latin American constitutes a promising attempt at appropriating data sovereignty from below although needs further development.

Biography

Sebastián Lehuedé is postdoctoral scholar at the Centre of Governance and Human Rights at the University of Cambridge and a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard University. Applying Latin American decolonial theory, Sebastián’s research focuses on the governance of digital technology in relation to global social justice. His current project examines the geopolitics of digital rights, interrogating the extent to which the work of activists in Latin America can speak to the visions and needs of the local context, vis-à-vis discourses and funding emanating from the North. As part of this project, Sebastián worked with digital rights organizations, an Indigenous community resisting mineral extraction, and an environmental group opposing the expansion of digital infrastructure. His work has been published in top communications journals including Information, Communication & Society and New Media & Society, and was recently recognized with the 2022 Dissertation Award from the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR).

Rahul Mukherjee
University of Pennsylvania

Abstract

Targeting “Neomobile” Users in Platformized India

As mobile internet reaches in the hands of India’s wider population, there is a rush among both global and local SVoD portals (SonyLiv, Netflix) and short video platforms (InstaReels, Moj) to cater to the needs and desires of the newly mobile, the “neomobile” audiences and users in provincial towns and rural hinterlands of India. This neomobile user is remarkably heterogenous, consisting of a significant young population spread across the regional and linguistic diversity of India. Based on extensive fieldwork, this paper describes and analyzes the ways that talent agents, OTT showrunners, and hyperlocal (social media) content creators working at various levels are shaping and curating content to target neomobile audiences/users. This targeting of neomobiles as the new spectatorship frontier to make inroads into creates challenges in terms of distributing content across varying geographies: maintaining streaming infrastructures, concerns about data sharing and protection, and the environmental implications of data sovereignty (Lobato 2019). In thinking with “Southern Digitalities,” I theorize the politics of construction of this neomobile user in an India undergoing accelerated platformization by tracing the socio-technical relations between platforms, consumer-citizens, and data- energy infrastructures as data and affect accumulate and circulate across local/transnational scales.

Biography

Rahul Mukherjee is Dick Wolf associate professor of television and new media in the Department of English and the Cinema and Media Studies program at University of Pennsylvania. His monograph Radiant Infrastructures: Media, Environment, and Cultures of Uncertainty (Duke University Press, 2020) examines debates related to radiation emitting technologies such as cell antennas and nuclear reactors. Rahul is currently working on a second book project Unlimited: Aspirational Politics and Mobile Media Distribution (under contract with MIT Press). He has published papers in journals like Science, Technology & Human Values, New Media & Society, and recently co-edited a special issue related to Media Power in Digital Asia for Media, Culture & Society.

Helga Tawil-Souri
New York University

Abstract

Is a Network Necessarily Dependent? Connectivity, Dependence, and Digital Sovereignty

The internet is a network of networks. Using the internet for whatever purpose, whether by an individual or an organization, through a smartphone or a computer, requires connection to a worldwide system of computer networks. By definition then the global technical infrastructure of the internet - that network of networks - challenges the notion of sovereignty: principles of independence, territoriality, (state) hierarchy, among others, seem to stand in opposition to the interconnected, diffuse, flexible, shifting constellations of global digital networks.

The overly dominant position of Western tech companies is often understood as a form of digital imperialism or digital colonialism, leading to new forms of hegemony, exploitation, and dependence across the Global South. Dependency scholars have traditionally argued that the Global South suffers economic underdevelopment as a consequence of its incorporation or participation in the world economy; to put it another way, it is the very dependence on a (capitalist) network that leads to underdevelopment. Yet from a network perspective, lack of connection itself is what results in harmful or exclusionary consequences. The distinction between core and periphery is then one of degree of connectivity, not type of role. Theoretically, core actors in a network are linked to everyone, while peripheral actors only share ties with the core. It is equally clear from a network perspective that it is the periphery’s incorporation as a relatively isolated actor that actually produces underdevelopment. In network terms, this is the periphery’s defining characteristic. Taking the question of “is a network necessarily dependent?” as its starting point, this talk explores key theoretical distinctions between dependency theory and network perspectives to think through notions and possibilities of digital sovereignty.

Biography

Helga Tawil-Souri is a media scholar interested in how spatiality, technology, and politics influence each other. Her work focuses on the Middle East and specifically contemporary Israel/Palestine. She is an associate professor at New York University in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies.

Chair

Yasemin Celikkol
Northwestern University in Qatar

Biography

Yasemin Y. Celikkol is the inaugural global postdoctoral scholar, affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South, at Northwestern University in Qatar. Her 2021 PhD dissertation from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, focused on transnational media traversing into historically antagonistic territory; specifically, Turkish television series in Bulgaria and Russia. Celikkol was a Doctoral Fellow of the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication (CARGC) (2017-2020) and she is currently a member of the CARGC Board of Advisors. Celikkol pursued her education in Bulgaria, Japan, and the US. She holds a Politics BA from New York University and a Sociolinguistics/Language Education MA from International Christian University in Tokyo. In addition to her PhD, from the University of Pennsylvania she holds a Communication MA (Annenberg) and an Intercultural Communication MS (Penn GSE). She is multilingual (Turkish, Bulgarian, Russian, Japanese, etc.). Celikkol tweets @yaseminyusufoff.

Respondent 

Fernanda Rosa
Virginia Tech University

Biography

Fernanda R. Rosa is assistant professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech. Her work is focused on internet governance and design, social justice, and the Global South. In her second and ongoing book project, she uses a novel method defined as code ethnography, and transdisciplinary lens founded on science and technologies studies, decolonial and feminist studies, to shed light on the power relations embedded in the information circulation infrastructure of the internet, and the way that our data circulates online. Some of her publications appear at Information, Communication & Society, Policy & Internet, Qualitative Sociology, and Social Media + Society.

 

Discussion and Concluding Remarks

4:45 - 5:00 p.m.

 

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