Sandra Ponzanesi participated in the workshop on ‘Decoloniality and the Digital Turn in Media Anthropology’ at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität LMU Munich on 11 October 2019.
The international workshop was organized and hosted by the Media Anthropology Network, European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA), ERC Project ForDigitalDignity (ONLINERPOL), and Sahana Udupa, Elisabetta Costa and Philipp Budka (LMU Munich).
The workshop critically explored “the digital turn” in the anthropological study of media, and aimed to push further ethnographic knowledge into the role that digital technologies play in people’s everyday life and broader sociopolitical transformations. In so doing, this workshop contributed to the reassessment of media anthropology in digital times, and raised critical questions on how digital media have posed new epistemological challenges, inspired methodological innovations, and offered opportunities for political activism for media anthropologists.
Key questions of the workshop were whether the digital turn has reconfigured the classic distinction between “home” and “field” through temporally intensified “horizontal” networks on a global scale; have these connections – culturally translated across different societies – collapsed the distinction between “home” and “field”? As users and researchers of digital media, how do we rework anthropology’s classic conundrum of home-field, distance-nearness and us-other in radically progressive ways? What does the “digital turn” entail in terms of how we engage research participants, and how do we use these new pathways to critique the multidirectional “colonial matrix of power” that is riding on the very infrastructure of contemporary digital media?
The full workshop program is available here.