Digitality, Marginality and Plural Subjectivities

Digitality, among marginalized communities, has become central to the negotiation of identities that are formed through acts of solidarity, registering resistance and sometimes in the act of performing the ‘everyday’. The domain of digitality is a complex site of negotiating socio-political and cultural histories of knowledge production and dissemination. This conference seeks to explore the transformative potential of digital environments as spaces for plural world-making, where plural identities take shape, language-cultures intermingle, and local and global imaginaries intersect. While digital spaces have become sites of articulating subjectivities and registering lived experiences, they are burdened with concerns of censorship, surveillance and misuse of data. They also draw our attention to the manner in which these digital networks are developed, designed and regulated, often replaying the latent bias and standardised prejudice of models based on architectures of colonial epistemologies. However, latent within these models are the ways in which specific algorithmic engagement critiques the homogenisation of cultural and linguistic differences while outlining alternate practices of digital mediation especially in a decolonial context.

From digital activism to storytelling, to community archives and creative expression, contemporary digital practices complicate fixed ideas of identity and generate new vocabularies for agency and solidarity. At the same time, emerging digital research methods such as digital archives, digital ethnography, network analysis, and critical data studies have paved the path for new forms of engagement with these formations of selfhood across mediated, multilingual, and affective spaces. For communities historically excluded from dominant narratives, the digital sphere offers both opportunity and risk. It provides visibility, connection, and creative agency, while also reproducing hierarchies of power and forms of surveillance.

Day 3 of the conference (4 February, starting 09:00 GMT) is fully online; once you have registered here to attend in person, you will receive a link to register for the third day's session via Teams Webinar. If you wish to attend the conference virtually on all three days, please do not register via Eventbrite and register here instead.

Accessibility: This event will take place at IASH, 2 Hope Park Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9NW. Please see a map here: https://www.iash.ed.ac.uk/location

The Seminar Room is on the first floor, and unfortunately IASH does not have a lift. If you have mobility issues and would like to discuss access, please contact [email protected] as soon as possible.

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Host or Publisher Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities