March 18th, Kersti Wissenbach will present her paper at COSMOS: The Centre on Social Movement Studies in Firenze, Italy.

Kersti announcing her presentation ‘Accounting for Power in a Datafied World’:

My current work aims to provide a social movement approach in order to study civic tech activism. I am asking How we can account for power dynamics in the strive to open up civil society space for governance engagement through data and technology infrastructure.

During the CosmoShare talk I will introduce my conceptual work aiming to emphasize the central role of communication for power dynamics in social and political change processes. Bringing into dialogue social movement studies and communication theory, I will build on contemporary conceptualisations within media practice theory (Kubitschko 2017; Couldry 2015) by contributing an enlarged framework that explicitly accounts for communication from a non-technical and a non-western perspective. To develop the framework, I turn to Freire and Pasquali’s theorization of communication as human relations.