On October the 9th, Stefania is in Modena (Italy) to talk about society and surveillance at the investigative journalism festival DIG (Documentari Inchieste Giornalismi) Awards. She will join on stage Philip Di Salvo (University della Svizzera Italiana), Veronica Barassi (University of St Gallen), Riccardo Coluccini and Biella Coleman (McGill University), in a panel asking “Can we live a life without surveillance”?. DIG is the biggest European investigative journalism festival.
The University of Amsterdam has a new Research Priority Area dedicated to exploring “Global Digital Cultures”. Global Digital Cultures is a interdisciplinary research community for comparing and analyzing the profound changes brought about by digitization around the globe. Read more here.
The kick-off event of the new Research Priority Area featured a keynote by Prof. Louise Amoore (Durham University) in conversation with our PI Stefania Milan, along the lines of Amoore’s latest book on “Cloud Ethics” (Duke University Press, 2020).
Niels ten Oever, Stefania Milan and Davide Beraldo co-authored the chapter “Studying Discourse in Internet Governance through Mailing-List Analysis” for the book Researching Internet Governance: Methods, Frameworks, Futures, edited by Laura DeNardisDerrick CogburnNanette S. Levinson and Francesca Musiani (MIT Press, 2020). The volume is open access, and you can read it all by following this link.
To celebrate the release of our new book on September 22, 2020 at 12pm EST on Zoom, some of the authors will present their chapters, including Niels. Register here to attend. Anriette Esterhuysen (Chair of the IGF’s Multistakeholder Advisory Group and Senior Advisor for Global and Regional Internet Governance at the Association for Progressive Communications) will be moderating the discussion. Presenters include Sandra Braman, Milton Mueller, Ron Deibert and Jeannette Hoffman.
Stefania was in Berlin on Saturday the 19th of September to give a talk at the Futurium museum–the awesome House of Futures.
With a reduced audience due to Covid-19, Stefania discussed risks and opportunities of datafication in conversation with Germany’s most famous science journalist, Ranga Yogeshwar. The event is available on YouTube. Note that the talk is in English with some inserts (e.g., the introduction) in German. Enjoy!
Only a few months ago, we were able to walk the streets with for the Women’s or climate march. Now streets are empty and activists, except for a few, stay at home. How to demonstrate in the so-called one-and-a-half meter society?
Stefania has been interviewed in an article by the Dutch critical public documentary series Tegenlicht / BackLight concerning protesting online. In light of COVID what does it mean to protest changes – read the full article here (in Dutch).
Please note that the upcoming special issue of Palabra Clave, titled “Latin American perspectives on datafication and artificial intelligence” decides to extend its original deadline (March 21, 2020) for abstract. The deadline has been extended until May the 1st, 2020.
Stefania Milan & Emiliano Treré as guest editors of this special issue.
More information on the CfP here:
Call for papers (Español): http://bit.ly/Pacla-CFP-2021-2-ES
Call for papers (English): http://bit.ly/Pacla-CFP-2021-2-EN
Call for papers en (Portugués): http://bit.ly/Pacla-CFP-2021-2-PT
Editors: Stefania Milan, Davide Beraldo, Cristina Flesher Fominaya
NEW DEADLINE: Due to COVID-19 situation, we have decided to extend the deadline. The new deadline is MAY 25, 2020
Datafication is changing the conditions under which contemporary social movements operate, opening up new terrains of contention. As a result, grassroots initiatives in the realm of data activism, data justice, algorithmic accountability and/or resistance to mass surveillance mushrooms in liberal and authoritarian regimes alike. These initiatives vary by scale, organizational forms, tactics, political visions and technological imaginaries. They may take data “as repertoires”, whereby data and data-based tactics are mobilized as constituents of innovative tactics, or “as stakes”, that is to say issues or objects of political struggle in their own right (Beraldo and Milan, 2019). However, they share an emphasis on the contentious politics of data.
While many instances of the contentious politics of data have come under the spotlight of specialists of digital politics and culture, social movement scholars are only starting to investigate the consequences of datafication on organized collective action. Yet datafication represents a paradigm change able to radically transform “social movement society”, urging social movements scholars to reflect on how it intersects with known social movement dynamics.
This Special Issue invites scholars of social movements and critical data studies to engage with i) case studies and ii) theoretical reflections illustrating the evolution of collective action vis-à-vis datafication. We are particularly interested in (interdisciplinary) theory development: fostering a dialogue across disciplinary boundaries, the Special Issue wants to bring the question of datafication -broadly defined -to bear on social movement scholarship, with the ambition of addressing what has been to date a “blind spot” in social movement literature, and cross-fertilizing disciplinary fields that have long remained disconnected.
Consequently, we welcome papers (max 8,000 words) engaging with the following:
• Unfamiliar empirical cases of: social movements’ critical engagement with the datafication agenda (e.g., Hong Kong activists dismantling lamp posts with surveillance cameras); creative incorporation of data-based practices and tactics in social movements’ repertoires (e.g., citizen-led collection of pollution data); social movements engaging in struggles around data issues (e.g., algorithmic accountability); examples of conflation between data as constituents of action repertoires and data as a contentious issue in its own right.
• Theoretical perspectives on, for instance, data activism, data justice, artificial intelligence, the relation between protest and social structures in the age of datafication, etc. as they intersect social movements and collective action processes, concepts, and research questions.
• Theoretical contributions on, e.g., the relation between data and the means-ends continuum in social movements, oriented to theory development in the field of social movement studies.
Abstracts due 30 April 2020
Acceptance announced by 15 May 2020
Paper development workshop last week of August 2020
Submissions due 30 November 2020
We invite the submission of structured extended abstracts (800-1000 words). Abstracts should be sent to contentiousdata-sms@data-activism.net no later than 30 April 2020. The outcome of the selection process will be notified no later than 15 May 2020. Prospective authors will be given the option to participate in a paper development workshop held at the University of Amsterdam in the last week of August (tentative date). Full paper submission (original articles of no more than 8.000 words) is due on 30 November 2020.
All papers will be subjected to double-blind peer review. For further instructions see the “Instructions for Authors” and “Style Guide” provided by Social Movement Studies.
Please contact us if you have any further inquiries:
We are glad to announce that our new special issue is out, Edited by Niamh Ní Bhroin and Stefania Milan:
Journal of Media Innovation (open access), Vol 6 No 1 (2020): Special issue: Media Innovation and Social Change
From the editors:
Our purpose with this Special Issue is to present and contribute to a body of research that critically explores the relationship between media innovation and social change. In doing so, we also outline the contours of a research agenda to further develop this emerging field. Our motivation arises from a review of research published in the nine previous editions of this journal, where we explored how research about media innovations engaged with the topic of social change. We find that research in the field of media innovations has tended to focus on business and economic imperatives for media innovation, following the paradigm of research on digitalisation introduced by von Hippel’s theories of ‘democratizing innovation’ (2005), Chesbrough’s ‘open innovation’ (2006), or Tapscott and Williams, ‘Wikinomics’ (2011). As a consequence, digitalisation and the introduction of new technologies is usually unquestioningly presented as a business imperative for media industry stakeholders.
Call for papers (English): http://bit.ly/Pacla-CFP-2021-2-EN
Call for papers en (Portugués): http://bit.ly/Pacla-CFP-2021-2-PT