AAG 2019 CFP
#Cyberprotest and Internet Disruption, Website Blocking, Net Surveillance:
Critical Geographies of Digital Dissent and Suppression
Amber Murrey and Patricia Daley, University of Oxford
Sponsored by African Geographies Specialty Group and Digital Geographies Specialty Group
The initial optimistic readings of digital communications and mobile technologies, such as the so-called Facebook and Twitter #Revolutions, have been revised to account for the disparities associated with Internet technologies, which have simultaneously amplified race, class, and gender inequalities and further embedded capitalist and colonial relations (Chun 2006; Hughes 2016; Gòmez-Barris 2017; Noble 2018). Human geographers and critical social scientists recognize the complex ways in which social media and the Internet more broadly operates as a critical mechanism of place- and community-making, bound up with complex contestations of political meaning-making, stories and counter-stories (Pickerill 2003; Leitner, Sheppard, and Sziarto 2008; Hands 2011). At the same time, digital spaces are increasingly being disrupted and inhibited through processes of infrastructural injustice, including stoppage, suspension, blackouts, user fees, throttling and more (Murrey 2019). Cyberspace has emerged as a contentious “terrain of resistance” within contemporary political, social, and economic struggle (Routledge 2017, 5).
State-led blackouts have been linked to increased rates of political and direct violence in Syria (Ghodes 2015). Sustained shutdowns, such as those in recent years in Cameroon, Ethiopia, and Mali, have been characterized as forms of “digital siege, wearing down public dissent under the guise of pacifying volatile situations” (Rydzak 2018, 13). Cambridge Analytica Ltd. representatives have disclosed that their surveillance technologies were first tested in countries of the global South. New policies have been proposed that would require the registration and regulation of online and social media content in Tanzania, Benin, and elsewhere, where “fees to operate” risk depressing usage through prohibitive costs. The Egyptian government recently passed an amendment to the media and press law No. 92 that deems social media users and blogs with more than 5,000 followers to be media or press outlets and, therefore, subject to the country’s laws and restrictions on journalists.
These cases raise important questions about the relationship between Internet suppressions and other forms of political and social control.
• How does “policing the net” compound, intensify, interlink and/or replace other forms of domination and policing?
• How are disruptions perceived and resisted in particular regions and communities?
• How does the monitoring and regulation of social media impact upon protest, activism, and solidarities?
This panel will consider tactics to suppress the Internet—from large-scale network shutdowns, to targeted website blocking and throttling, to online surveillance of activists and activists’ families, to international networks of international information sharing, to the arrest and prosecution of activists as “cyber-terrorists.” We are also interested in papers that consider current transitions and shifts in online activism more broadly.
We welcome papers that explore the following themes, and more:
· Responses to, circumventing of and/or resistances against forms of digital policing and disruption
· Everyday experiences and encounters with Internet disruption, blackouts, regulation, and surveillance
· State targeting of Internet infrastructure as “tactical point” during or preemptive to protests, conflict, struggle, elections, and more
· Relationships between the targeting of Internet infrastructure amid other forms of infrastructural violence
· Normalization of State restrictions on online content and/or rise of social media user fees and taxes
· Censorship, content restriction, and throttling
· #BlackTwitter, anti-racism, and transnational shared articulations of grievances via the circulation of episodes and patterns of violence on social media (#FreeBobiWine, #FreeTheArrested, #BringBackOurGirls, and more)
· #BringBackOurNet, #KeepItOn, and other movements for digital rights
· Prosecution and imprisonment of activists as “cyberterrorists”
· Spread/travel of repressive techniques and surveillance technologies across borders and regions
· State and corporate financial investment in forms of digital policing and/or digital colonialism
Please send a paper title and 250-word abstract to [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> and [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> by 14th October 2018.
Works Cited
Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. 2006. Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Hands, J. 2011. @ is for Activism: Dissent, Resistance and Rebellion in a Digital Culture. London: Pluto Press.
Hughes, B. 2016. The Bleeding Edge: Why Technology Turns Toxic in an Unequal World. New York: New Internationalist.
Ghodes, A. 2015. Pulling the Plug: Network Disruptions and Political Violence in Civil Conflict. Journal of Peace Research 52(3), 352-367.
Gòmez-Barris, M. 2017. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Pickerill, J. 2003. Cyberprotest: Environmental Activism On-Line. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Leitner, H., Sheppard, E. and Sziarto, KM. 2008. The Spatialities of Contentions Politics. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 33(2),157-172.
Murrey, A. 2019. Slow Dissent and Permanent Counterrevolution. Review of African Political Economy 46(156).
Noble, S. U. 2018. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: New York University Press.
Routledge, P. 2017. Space Invaders: Radical Geographies of Protest. London: Pluto Press.
Rydzak, J. 2018. Disconnected: A Human Rights-Based Approach to Network Disruptions. Global Network Initiative: 1-33.
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