Alternative Platforms, Alternative Politics

Media Non-Migration

Elisabetta Costa, University of Antwerp

Abstract

A new wave of media migration (Lange, 2022) has taken place in the last few months. Donald Trump’s electoral success supported by Elon Musk’s Twitter, together with Facebook’s new fact checking regulations, has prompted a movement away from mainstream digital platforms. However, a significant number of critical users and activists have decided to remain on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. This talk explores the phenomenon of media non-migration, the practice of staying on a platform rather than leaving. Building on Patricia Lange’s work on media migration (2022), it examines the reasons that bring people to stay even if they recognise risks and problems. What motivations inform their decision to stay? What dynamics come into play? Patricia G. Lange engaged with traditional anthropological migration literature to understand why people migrate to different platforms. This talk will reflect on what insights can migration theories offer to the study of media non-migration.

Bio

Elisabetta Costa is a digital anthropologist. She is Associate Professor at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Her research focuses on how people’s everyday uses of media technologies change relationships, gender, politics, work, and mobility. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in Lebanon, southeast Turkey, and Italy. Her books include Social Media in Southeast Turkey (2016, UCL Press), How the World Changed Social Media (with Miller D. et al., 2016 UCL Press), the Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology (co-edited with Lange P. G, Haynes N., and Sinanan J., 2022, Routledge). She is the PI of a newly funded ERC Consolidator Grant, Remote Work and Social Change: An anthropological approach.

Xiaohongshu as an Infrastructure of Global China: The cultural geographies of triangulation, investment, and taste making

Carwyn Morris, Leiden University & Yuchen Chen, CUNY

Abstract

Taking place at the intersection of media studies, global China studies, and critical infrastructure studies, this talk uses experiences from China, Germany, the UK, and the US to understand and consider how the social media service, Xiaohongshu, functions as a form of transnational connective infrastructure which supports the global mobility of Chinese capital. As the literature on infrastructure studies highlights, infrastructure becomes particularly visible during infrastructural breakdowns, and as Chinese citizens become disconnected from China’s digital infrastructure Xiaohongshu becomes an essential tool for navigating and understanding the world. Xiaohongshu helps Chinese actors operate and connect globally, influences how they experience the world, and enables new connections to be made. Xiaohongshu’s effects are particularly visible in the cultural industries, where users share, discuss, and support businesses that offer experiences that resonate with Chinese consumers. At the same time, Xiaohongshu helps Chinese capital become active globally, it supports Chinese capital investment, and it helps investors triangulate sites for investment. During this process, Xiaohongshu both supports global mobility and individual attempts to stay global. This, we argue, also makes Xiaohongshu an infrastructure of displacement, with Xiaohongshu users supporting ventures that displace existing space users. through new cultural geographies of Chineseness. 

Bio

Carwyn Morris is a human geographer at Leiden Institute for Area Studies, Leiden University. Carwyn's research examines the relationship between digital systems, social media, and space through case studies of migrant food markets, activism, and internet famous places. Carwyn's research explores digitality and the social at multiple scales, including how digital territories emerge, the territorial relationship to digital sovereignty, and how users and companies navigate a territorialized digital world. The paper is cu-authored by Yuchen Chen, who is a communications scholar at CUNY, Baruch College. Yuchen's work examines how brokerage works within Chinese diasporic communities in the United States. She is an ethnographer of digital cultures and contemporary China. Her work looks into two main themes: China’s data-driven population management and China's global outreach via digital platforms. Her work is situated at the intersections of feminist science and technology studies, digital studies, and China studies.

Alternative Media in India and China: Non-gatekept sources of anti-Westernism

Ralph Schroeder, University of Oxford

Abstract

In India under Modi’s populist government and in Xi’s authoritarian party-state, as elsewhere, non-gatekept online media act as vehicles for counter-publics. Many of these are progressive in the sense that they challenge, among others, Modi’s exclusionary anti-Muslim and anti-secular agendas. And in China, these counter-publics consist of social movements such as feminism and environmentalism. But there are also retrogressive counter-publics which advocate for an ultranationalist politics that fits with the ‘rightful rise’ of China and India and which is also directed at domestic ‘enemies’ that allegedly seek to undermine the strength of the nation. In this talk I will provide examples of these counter-publics and present data from alternative outlets and social media that illustrate their aims. The examples are not symmetrical as between the two countries in view of the different contexts. But I will argue that they are indicative of a wider trend towards ultranationalism and populism which is enabled in part by non-gatekept online mobilization. Despite the fact that India still leans diplomatically towards the West and China’s publics have mixed attitudes, online content reveals emerging pro- and anti-Western cleavages among counter-publics with varying possibilities for success.

Bio

Ralph Schroeder is professor of Social Science of the Internet at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. Before coming to Oxford in 2004, he was Professor in the School of Technology Management and Economics at Chalmers University in Gothenburg (Sweden). He completed his PhD about Max Weber at the LSE in 1988. He has authored or co-authored more than 180 papers. His recent book publications include An Age of Limits: Social Theory for the 21st Century (Palgrave Macmillan 2013) and, with Eric T. Meyer, of Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities (MIT Press 2015). His recent interests have resulted in Online Politics in India and China: Social Theory beyond East and West (forthcoming: Oxford University Press).

Whatsapp Voice Messages, Ephemerality and Online Archival Practices of Social Movements in the West-African Diaspora

Lotte Pelckmans, University of Copenhagen

Abstract

This talk will analyse how voice messages shared on WhatsApp pose a challenge for activist groups wishing to keep records for later legal, political or other use. Activism through such electronic forms of ephemerality, generates tension between the fragility and short-livedness of online data, on the one hand, and the longer temporality of archives created for political purposes, on the other. I introduce the concept of e-phemeral archiving to analyse the way in which marginalized, largely illiterate groups of West African “slave descendants”, share their concerns and activist messages through voice messages on WhatsApp. The case study focuses on a diasporic anti-slavery movement of West African Soninke speakers in Europe called Ganbanaaxun Fedde (hereafter GF), meaning ‘Federation of Equality’. GF mobilises against discrimination of descendants of the enslaved of the internal African Slave trade. Legacies of that internal trade are still tangible for these descendants, who are e.g. excluded from ownership of land and positions of power. In late 2016, GF members in Paris moved activism online in what they call ’The Forum' -a constellation of over 40 interconnected WhatsAppGroups -either location or topic-based. This enlarged the scale of GF membership, by interconnecting minority members of Soninke diasporas globally. The talk will analyse how the amplification of online voice messages by predominantly illiterate members, has impacted on the reach, the effects and the curation of messages in the WhatsApp Groups.

Bio

Lotte Pelckmans is an anthropologist interested in the intersection between (post-)slavery, media, conflict and migration, mainly in francophone West Africa and its diaspora. She obtained her MA and PhD at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands, and went on to teach anthropology and development studies at the University of Nijmegen and the Institute of History at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands. Since 2016, she has lived in Denmark, working initially at the Danish Institute for International Studies, where she was co-editor of the documentary film ‘River Nomads’ (2017, 42min), which explores the transnational mobility of nomadic fishermen in West Africa (Niger, Nigeria, Mali) and later on she made the documentary film ‘Ganbanaaxun Fedde’ (2024, 36min) as part of a research project on the historical and contemporary displacement of slave descendants in Mali, funded by GCRF/UKRI UK (2020-2023). She is currently employed at the Centre for Advanced Migration Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Her projects explore how Africa's slave past reverberates and haunts contemporary moral regimes of voice and (legal) representation, in both on- and offline forms of citizenship, resistance and mobilities.