#GoingGlobal: Studying Global Digital Cultures in non-Western contexts

This lecture series presents research in progress at the Department of the Digital Humanities, which is critically inquiring the implications of digital technologies on our global digital cultures, digital heritage and culture, exploring opportunities for computation in the Arts and Humanities, and enriching the role of these fields in the domain of Computer Science. Joins us!

Going Global - Roundtable: Over the last academic year, the members of the Department of Digital Humanities have held a series of talks doing research on Global Digital Cultures in non-Western contexts. This emerging Research Cluster covers a wide array of geographies - India, Japan, Malaysia, Morocco, Somalia and South Africa - and an equally wide range of topics - virtual idols, memes, museums, infrastructures, and more.

We want to warmly invite you to this roundtable discussion, in which we bring together the speakers from last year’s Going Global talk series to reflect on what it means to study Global Digital Cultures. By drawing connections and comparisons between our different topics and geographies of study, the participants will offer insights into politics and problematics of studying digital technologies across the world.

Participants: Elisa Oreglia, Peter Chonka, Ashwin Mathew, Laura Gibson, Niki Cheong, Rafal Zaborowski, Cristina Moreno Almeida

 

Short biography of participants:

Dr. Elisa Oreglia is Senior Lecturer in Global Digital Cultures at DDH. She researches the adoption, adaptation and use of digital technologies among different communities in Asia and in the Global South in general. She is interested in the localised socio-technical practices that emerge from technology users who are far from urban centres and advanced economies, as well as the political economy that surrounds technology development and circulation.

Dr. Peter Chonka is Lecturer in Global Digital Cultures at DDH. He studies transnational Somali-language media networks and their impact on the cultural politics of state reconstruction in the Horn of Africa. His recent publications have explored the production, dissemination and use of digital texts in this media environment, and online/offline contestation between the state and militant opposition groups. As such, he’s interested in how the new media environment affects political reconstruction, civil society activism, and conflict in so-called ‘fragile’ states.

Dr. Ashwin Mathew is Lecturer in Global Digital Cultures at DDH. He is an ethnographer of Internet infrastructure, studying the technologies and technical communities involved in the operation of the global Internet. He is interested in how the Internet is built and maintained in everyday practice; and how the cultures of the Internet’s technical communities circulate and are re-articulated across Global South and Global North in the process of operating the Internet.

Dr. Laura Gibson is Lecturer in Digital Content Management Education at DDH. Her research on decolonisation and digitisation is informed by several years working in South African museums, including as Collections and Digitisation Manager at the Luthuli Museum national legacy project. Laura’s current research, part funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, considers issues of indigenous knowledge exchange and repatriation in South Africa using digital tools.

Dr. Niki Cheong is Lecturer in Digital Culture and Society at DDH. He has researched the practices by political actors in Malaysia engaging in the online manipulation of information, known as cybertroopers. He is broadly interested in the everyday navigation of (political) information in online spaces, with a focus on disinformation, digital practices, and digital citizenship. Currently, he is researching how popular culture is weaponised on WhatsApp in Malaysia and Singapore (funded by the Facebook Integrity Foundational Research Award). He is also part of a UNESCO-funded research project mapping online resources for LGBTI+ youth and other young key populations in the Asia-Pacific region.

Dr. Rafal Zaborowski is Lecturer in Digital Culture at DDH. He has studied the intersections of media audiences, texts and producers, focusing especially on the role played by media in people's everyday lives. More specifically,he is interested in how social practices of listening and engagements with music and sound correspond to changes in modern digital cultures. He is also interested in the issues of voice, power and representation in and through media.His work in this area has focused on media framing of crisis and migration as well as on new digital forms of communication on news platforms.

Dr. Cristina Moreno Almeida is Lecturer in Digital Cultures & Arabic Cultural Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at QMUL. She is interested in cultural production and digital cultures at the intersection of aesthetics, politics, and power with a particular focus on North Africa and the Middle East. Across the range of her work, she has studied youth culture and rap music, memes and digital cultural production, discourses on power and resistance, patriotism and nationalism including renewed forms of Far-Right.