Project title
Looking Back - Looking Forward: A reflection on 20 years “Online Communities”
Project description
For over two decades Miriyam Aouragh’s research has focused on the social and political implications of information and communication technologies, particularly in Palestine and amongst the Palestinian diaspora. Her contributions to the development of ethnographic research around the internet have shed light on notions related to online communities, digital ethnography and techno-political infrastructures. Through her multi-sited and long-term ethnographic research she challenges prevailing notions underlying tech-solutionism. Whether online activism as liberatory or providing ways to avoid the false binaries of tech-politics as either allowing for analytical optimism or pessimism, her intellectual interventions have prioritised a grounded methodology in generating empirical evidence and a critical theory for understanding the larger infrastructures on which digital politics relies.
This project revisits earlier claims and observations through three key areas: 1. The changes and continuities in digital infrastructures as material and economic phenomena; 2. The changing political realities in which these materiality’s are produced and used, 3. The changing social demographics and the presence of a new generation of internet users. By reflectively examining new infrastructural developments, evolving political contexts, and different internet user generations, Miriyam Aouragh aims to deepen our ethnographic understanding of the dynamic relationship between technology, society, and politics in the digital age. Moreover, this triangular reassessment of digital transformation allows to theoretically explore the development of technology in social life throughout the short-yet-intense history of the internet.
Selected publications
Aouragh, M. 2018. Occupation and liberation in the digital age. in: Meikle, G. (ed.) The Routledge Companion To Media And Activism Routledge. pp. 223-231
Aouragh, M. and Chakravartty, P. 2016. Infrastructures of empire: towards a critical geopolitics of media and information studies. Media, Culture and Society. 38 (4), pp. 559-575.
Alexander, A. and Aouragh, M. 2014. Egypt’s unfinished revolution: the role of the media revisited. International Journal of Communication. 8, pp. 890-915.
Aouragh, M. 2011. Palestine online: transnationalism, the Internet and the construction of identity. London: Bloomsbury I.B. Tauris.