Lina Dencik (Cardiff University): Towards Data Justice? Political activism and social media

One of the key political questions of our time is the relationship between media technology and activism. Lina Dencik’s presentation will explore this in two different respects. In the first part, she will look at the contradictory and paradoxical aspects of commercial social media use for the purposes of anti-systemic social movements, particularly for labour activism and worker resistance. In the second part, the presentation will then move on to focus particularly on the implications of digital surveillance for political activism.

Advancing a framework of ‘data justice’ the presentation will make the case that issues of social media and the (mass) collection of data need to be reformulated beyond techno-legal concerns with encryption and privacy in order to be further integrated into the social and economic justice agendas of political activists across the board.

All seminars are free. To understand how many attendees we can expect, we kindly ask you to register.

Biography

Dr Lina Dencik is Lecturer and Director of MA Journalism, Media and Communication at the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University. Her research is concerned with the interplay between media developments and social and political change, with a particular focus on globalisation and resistance. She is currently doing research for the ESRC-funded project ‘Digital Citizenship and Surveillance Society’ hosted at Cardiff University and she is the author of Media and Global Civil Society (2012), Worker Resistance and Media (with Peter Wilkin, 2015) and Critical Perspectives on Social Media and Protest (with Oliver Leistert, 2015).