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The Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King's College London has the pleasure of hosting a research seminar on Wednesday 3 February 2021 with Dr Wendy Willems.
The notion of affordance has regained popularity in recent years and has frequently been invoked in relation to work on digital technology, leading some scholars to refer to it as one of the ‘keywords’ in the field of media and communication studies. Linking up with wider debates in our field on the need for ‘dewesternising’, ‘internationalising’ and ‘decolonising’ knowledge production, this seminar will suggest that debates on digital affordances have been characterised by a degree of digital universalism and platform-centrism. Mobile devices and social media platforms are often treated as separate (physical or digital) objects which function independently from each other and from the environments in which they are used. However, mobile phone use has increasingly been dominated by social media apps while social media are frequently accessed via mobile devices, particularly in Global South contexts where users often rely on mobile-only internet access via subsidized/zero-rated social media data bundles. Furthermore, the affordances of mobile social media are shaped by the physical, mediated and political contexts in which they are used.
Drawing on research carried out in Zambia, this seminar proposes the notion of ‘relational affordance’ to emphasize the interplay between mobile social media, users and their varied contexts. It examines three ‘relational affordances’ – infrastructure, home-based access and temporality – which help to explain the emergence of active mobile social media publics during political volatile times such as elections.
Speaker bio
Dr Wendy Willems is Associate Professor and Deputy Head of the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research interests include global digital culture and social change, postcolonial/decolonial approaches to media and communications and urban communication. She has published articles in journals such as Communication Theory, Information, Communication and Society, Popular Communication and Media, Culture and Society. She is co-editor of Civic Agency in Africa: Arts of Resistance in the Twenty-First Century (James Currey, 2014; with Ebenezer Obadare) and Everyday Media Culture in Africa: Audiences and Users (Routledge, 2016, with Winston Mano).
This is a virtual seminar. Joining instructions will be sent the day before the event.