AoIR2016: Activism

Digital Unmasking: the Ethical Issue of Crowd Surveillance Mathias Klang, University of Massachusetts Boston [This talk opened, rather jarringly, with a quotation from a guy who recently left ToR after multiple accusations of long-term predatory behaviour. I admit that this unsettled me substantially and probably didn't help with my note-taking.] Is there a right to … Continue reading AoIR2016: Activism →

AoIR2016: Cultures

I opened the panel by discussing some of the ways in which solidarity is being built online around the Kurdish struggle for autonomy. You can find my slides here: I found it interesting that one of the questions I got was basically, "but which methodological box does your presentation fit within?" (and, perhaps, the unspoken … Continue reading AoIR2016: Cultures →

AoIR 2016: fakes

Images of protest in contested social media: Production, propagation, and narratives Luca Rossi, Christina Neumayer, Julie Vulpius. IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark. This paper discussed the social media campaign around the Blockupy protests in Frankfurt, which was marked by the co-presence of #blockupy, #destroika, and #notroika hashtags. Researchers differentiated between images of explicit violence (for … Continue reading AoIR 2016: fakes →

The work of solidarity and healing

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about the ways in which we are hurt by the world, and about the ways in which we might heal from those hurts. We are hurt by the effects of racism, inequality, political disenfranchisement, sexism, rigid gender and sexual identities, the displacements of migration, ableism, and structures which often … Continue reading The work of solidarity and healing →

AoIR16: Day 1, part 1. Stitching Poetics and #BlackLivesMatter.

micha cárdenas' plenary, Trans of colour poetics: imagining futures of survival, began with the room collaboratively playing redshift & portal. It's a beautiful, heartbreaking game, and I was a little surprised by how affecting the collective experience was ("What do you mean leave? NO! STAY AND HELP!"). cárdenas used this as a way of exploring … Continue reading AoIR16: Day 1, part 1. Stitching Poetics and #BlackLivesMatter. →