New advances in explorations of technocultural assemblages: Moving beyond ontological divides in the study of the digital, the social and the cultural.
Across the globe, feminist, women’s rights, and LGBTI+ movements struggle against local, colonial, national and transnational violence, threats and norms. To be sure, constructions of place and nationality are inseparable from struggles for social justice and from the conditions of social movements, who encounter multiple and diverse power hierarchies in various locations across the globe. Simultaneously, in civil society today, new communities and groups of collective actors emergein transational space through digital technologies.
Attending to these developments, and inspired by the critical interventions of postcolonial feminist and technoscience scholars, we want to move beyond the idea of an ontological divide between humans and machines and study the interconnections between the digital, the social and the cultural – which we refer to as technocultural assemblages. From different perspectives and contexts, contributions to this panel will illuminate new insights on the relation between digital technologies and emergent communities and include:
- Explorations of the notion of contextual anchoring in collective movements online
- Digital collective action on Twitch: The Blizzard-Hong Kong case
- Reclaiming queer places through networked activism: The Case of Istanbul Pride
This panel emerges from discussions in the research cluster TechnAct: Transformations of Struggle which seeks to provide a collaborative platform to develop approaches to study the interconnections between the digital, the social and the cultural and to share knowledge on the relation between digital technologies and emergent communities in transnational space.
Onur Kılıç is a PhD candidate in Gender Studies at the University of Gothenburg. As a member of TechnAct research cluster, he explores the impacts of digital technologies on queer activisms in Turkey considering translocal and transnational connections. He is particularly interested in rearticulations of queer subjectivities through online and offline entanglements, politics of Pride, and practices of networked resistance.
Mia Liinason is professor of Gender Studies at the University of Gothenburg. Mia is director of the research cluster TechnAct and interested in the various ways in which transnational collectives materialize through the technology of digital platforms. She also leads the project Spaces of Resistance, examining transnational encounters in feminist and LGBTI+ activism in Scandinavia, Russia and Turkey.
Nadia Ruiz Bravo is a PhD student in information systems at the University of Gothenburg. She is a member of TechnAct research cluster. Her research project focuses in the interconnections between digital technologies, digital platforms in particular, and social aspects such as social movements, collective action, gender, and sexualities.
Lisen Selander is associate professor of Information Systems at the University of Gothenburg. She is currently engaged in multiple research projects exploring the role institutions and digital platforms in contemporary collective action.