March 2018
UK C4D Network Chapter Meet-Up on 28 March in London or via Skype
Our next C4D Network UK Meet-Up will take place on Wednesday 28 March in London. Nicola Harford and Mary Myers will lead an informal session on ‘External evaluation and review of media and communications for development: experiences and insights’. Nicola and Mary have conducted many assignments for donors and NGOs including mid-term and annual reviews of programmes e.g. BBC Media Action’s Global Grant and Governance and Transparency Fund project, and end evaluations for Internews projects in Kenya and Myanmar; the…
Find out more »September 2019
(After) Hybrid Media Activism
Emiliano Treré is a Senior Lecturer in Media Ecologies and Social Transformation in the School of Journalism, Media and Culture at Cardiff University. He is the author of Hybrid Media Activism: Ecologies, Imaginaries, Algorithms (Routledge, 2018), winner of the Outstanding Book Award of the ICA Activism, Communication and Social Justice Interest Group. Emiliano reflects on the current and future challenges of research into the evolving relationship between media technologies and social movements (what he calls the Media/Movement Dynamic: MMD). Relying on an extensive meta-analysis of…
Find out more »November 2019
Children and Screen Media in Arab Contexts: An Ethnographic Perspective
Focusing on ethnographic research conducted with Syrian refugee children living in Beirut, our talk will show how both the researchers and their interlocutors were caught up in the political economy of fear produced by the context of war and the sectarian politics imposed by Hezbollah. It will rethink the whatness of media, moving from a conventional definition of broadcasting/digitality/screen/computer to a more ontological and pluralistic interpretation that considers media as extended bodily forms of technicity. It argues that limiting the…
Find out more »We Need to Talk About Robots: Gender, Datafication and AI
This talk reviews how the acceleration of data infrastructure development and growing adoption of data practices in everyday life are entwined with wider cultural discourses about gender and sexuality. Using artificial intelligence (AI) assistants and social robots such as Alexa and Siri as an example, it analyses these links from a feminist data studies perspective focusing on three key themes. Aristea Fotopoulou is the author of “Feminist Activism and Digital Networks: Between Empowerment and Vulnerability” (2017, Palgrave Macmillan/Springer) and currently…
Find out more »December 2019
Internet Memes and Society: Social, Cultural and Political Contexts
This talk is about a recently published book on memes which provides a solid, encompassing definition of internet memes, exploring both the common features of memes around the globe and their particular regional traits. It identifies and explains the roles that these viral texts play in internet communication. It looks at cultural, social and political implications; significance for self-representation and identity formation; promotion of alternative opinion or trending interpretation; and subversive and resistant power in relation to professional media, propaganda,…
Find out more »