Global Digital Cultures Research Group

How does the digital world look from non-Western perspectives? How do people around the world produce, appropriate, adapt, repurpose and resist digital technologies that originate from a handful of Western and East Asian countries? How do local practices of engagement with the digital circulate regionally and around the world, and how do they change during their travels? These are some of the questions that we ask in the Global Digital Cultures Research Group, approaching them from different disciplinary and methodological traditions, and focusing on different countries and regions, but also on global phenomena and their local articulations. 

These are some of our projects:

• How digital surveillance is interwoven in people’s daily lives, from a comparative, anthropological perspective (Vita Peacock)
• How digital rights are defined and by whom in the “Global South” (Peter Chonka, Ashwin Mathew, Elisa Oreglia)
• How Chinese tech is expanding in neighbouring countries (Elisa Oreglia);
• How digital technologies (like social media and mobile money) are influencing mobility and social relations in conflict and climate-crisis affected contexts (Peter Chonka)
• How virtuality is re-defining audience engagements and music industry practices in Japan (Rafal Zaborowski)
• How political information flows through social media and chat apps in Southeast Asia (Niki Cheong)
• How digital (an)archives can challenge entrenched colonial narratives in (South) Africa (Laura Gibson)
• How the priorities and practices of refugees play out in humanitarian digital economies, from Jordan and Kenya to the UK (Margie Cheesman)
• How AI is reconfiguring land relations and environmental struggles in Latin America (Sebastián Lehuedé)
• The interplay between Kazakhstan's digitalization programs and tech companies and investments from China, Russia, and the West (Oyuna Baldakova)

We organise a biweekly online seminar where we invite guest speakers from all around the world to discuss their work on global digital cultures, and we occasionally meet online to discuss research in this area. Get in touch if your work touches upon the digital and non-Western countries in any way, and sign up to our mailing list for talk announcements and other news (low volume list)