Critical Digital and Social Media Research

DIGSUM, the Centre for Digital Social Research, at Umeå University invites PhD students, postdocs, and other interested researchers, from any country or university to take part in this workshop and symposium on the topic of critical digital and social media research.

The event features a series of internationally prominent keynotes in the field:

• Mark Andrejevic, author of e.g. Infoglut: How too much information is changing the way we think and know (Routledge, 2013).
• Christian Fuchs, author of e.g. Digital Demagogue: Authoritarian capitalism in the age of Trump and Twitter (Pluto, 2018).
• Kylie Jarrett, author of e.g. Feminism, Labour and Digital Media: The Digital Housewife (Routledge, 2016).
• Simon Lindgren, author of e.g. Digital Media and Society: Theories, topics, and tools (SAGE, 2017).
• Annette Markham, author of e.g., Ethics as Impact (Social Media + Society, 2018)
• Donatella Della Ratta, author of e.g. Shooting a Revolution; Visual Media and Warfare in Syria (Pluto, 2018).
• Richard Rogers, author of e.g. Digital Methods (MIT Press, 2013)

Critical theories, critical methodologies and critical practices are cornerstones of digital and social media research. Such approaches are tools for questioning big data fetishism and the dominance of overly data-driven analytics. This combined symposium and PhD workshop wants to contribute to the advancement of critical approaches, methodologies, theories, epistemologies, practices, and ethics in this field of scholarship.

Themes and questions for discussion include, but are not limited to:

• What methodologies do we need to study digital and social media critically?
• What forms and contents of critical theory do we need to analyse digital and social media critically?
• What are the realities of digital and social media in the context of contemporary capitalism, surveillance, the public sphere, culture, ideology, nationalism, authoritarianism, social struggles, activism, participation, nature/the environment, education, arts and creativity?
• How can we best critically study these digital realities? What are important results of such studies?

The event takes place in Umeå, Sweden, 6-8 March 2019, and is hosted by DIGSUM together with CAMRI (Communication and Media Research Institute, University of Westminster, London, UK). Since 2015, DIGSUM and CAMRI have operated a strategic partnership on digital and social media research funded by STINT: The Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education. It has focused on the exchange of staff and PhD researchers as well as events and meetings in Umeå and London. The symposium and workshop, targeting a wider group of participants focused on critical digital and social media studies, is the project's final event.

The event, aside from the keynotes, presents an opportunity for PhD students and postdocs to present a short paper and receive feedback from CAMRI and DIGSUM researchers, and prominent international participants. Thereafter there will be the opportunity to submit articles for consideration for DIGSUM's new open access Journal of Digital Social Research.

Conference committee
Anastasia Denisova, CAMRI, University of Westminster
Donatella Della Ratta, John Cabot University
Christian Fuchs (Conference Co-Chair), CAMRI, University of Westminster
Simon Lindgren (Conference Co-Chair), DIGSUM, Umeå University
Ragnar Lundström, DIGSUM, Umeå University
Samuel Merrill, DIGSUM, Umeå University
Pieter Verdegem, CAMRI, University of Westminster