The Internet and digital media are increasingly shaping the way we learn, think, and interact; and they are changing many aspects of how society and culture are organised. Anthropologists argue that the digitalisation of everyday life is the single biggest cultural shift in the history of humanity since the advent of money (Horst & Miller, 2011).
Whatever your research topic or discipline, it almost certainly intersects with digital culture in some way. Broadly speaking, the internet is the principal tool of the researcher as its browsers and websites enable easy access to information, and its communication platforms will most likely mediate relationships with research participants. More specifically, whether you identify as an artist, historian, linguist or social scientist, your research object is already being recoded as a digital artefact and/or being hotly contested on social media right now.
How do we incorporate this breakneck digitalisation of the everyday into our research?
This essential 5-part crash course in digital culture studies provides an overview of the main theoretical debates around the impact of digital technology. We will get you thinking through a digital lens via five 2-hour lectures/seminars supported by high impact readings and low intensity assignments. If you have any questions please feel free to reach out. And if you can only join some of the sessions for some reason, let us know and we’ll try and figure something out.
Essential information:
Fridays 10am-12pm on Zoom (how could we not?)
Fri 24 Nov (Week 8) Sessions 1: What is Digital? Origins, Infrastructures, and Divides.
Fri 1 Dec (Week 9) Session 2: Welcome to the Digital Utopia. 90’s optimism, participatory culture, and the Arab Spring.
Fri 8 Dec (Week 10) Session 3: The Dark Side and Digital Dystopia. Post-truth, surveillance, and the slide towards political polarisation.
Fri 15 Dec (Week 11) Session 4: Platformisation of Culture. What does the digital mean for the creative industries?
Fri 12 Jan 2024 (Week 1) Session 5: Unboxing ‘Black Box’ Society. WTF are Algorithms, AI, Big Data et al?
By registering, we strongly encourage you to attend all five sessions. We will organise a low intensity assignment over the Christmas break between session 4 and 5. Please note that session outline above is a draft and we may tweak the content as we go depending on your needs.
We will also provide 1:1s (or group sessions if preferred) to help researchers locate the digital in their own research plans and give advice about how to approach it.
The course will be delivered by current CHASE-funded PhD researchers, Abhishek Mohanty and Craig Ryder.
Abhishek Mohanty is a PhD researcher in Social Anthropology at SOAS, studying how health app start-ups imagine futures. His 14 months’ fieldwork has him ethnographically embedded with a health app start-up in India (Chandigarh) and with a digital health collective in the UK (London, starting soon). Previously he has published research on teleconsultation, alternative ontologies adopted by tech start-up founders (both India), mask-wearing, and online governance during COVID19 (both UK). You can find him on LinkedIn, and connect with him on 676326@soas.ac.uk.
Craig Ryder is an interdisciplinary PhD researcher at SOAS investigating how activists use social media to politically participate in Sri Lanka. He has returned from 6 months fieldwork in Colombo and is currently writing up his thesis. Last year, Craig also spent 6 months as a Visiting Researcher at the University of Helsinki looking at computational approaches to ethnography. Craig is the founder of the DiSCo Studies Collective (DiSCo) and co-managing editor of the DiSCo Journal. He tweets in fits and starts from @ryder_withawhy. His out-of-date website is craigeryder.com
You can also join or follow the DiSCo at: