Edgar Gómez-Cruz
Biographic Data
| ID | 296529 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Edgar Gómez-Cruz |
| GIVEN NAMES | Edgar |
| FAMILY NAME | Gómez-Cruz |
| SIGNATURE | GÓMEZ-CRUZ E |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Texas at Austin |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0055-9966 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 155 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Territorializing Internet: WhatsApp use in Andean Argentina
Internet studies have predominantly focused on the most recent platforms, leaving out many different ways to use internet that become invisible for mainstream studies. At the same time, the majority of internet studies are centered on urban contexts, leaving out populations and their use of internet in rural territories. WhatsApp has emerged as one of the most widely used apps, particularly in the Global South. However, its integration into rural…
Mobile mutuality of being: WhatsApp and kinship at the top of the world
Digital technologies have become ubiquitous infrastructures worldwide, with WhatsApp emerging as one of the most widely used apps, particularly in the Global South. However, its integration into rural and Indigenous contexts in Latin America remains relatively unexplored. The Jujuy Puna, situated in Northwest Argentina and home to Quechua communities, recently gained internet connectivity through state initiatives. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwo…
Temu is evil, but I still use it”: Platform cynicism in platform capitalism
Recent scholarship in critical algorithm studies has illuminated how users negotiate and resist algorithmic influence in everyday platform use, yet these perspectives remain underexplored in online consumption. Bridging theoretical frameworks of consumer culture and critical algorithm studies, this study examines the complexities of algorithmic consumer culture and practices through qualitative research on users’ experiences with Temu. We introdu…
Rumo a uma teoria popular de algoritmos
his paper establishes dialogs between theories on the popular and critical studies on algorithms and datafication. In doing so, it contributes to reversing the analytical tendency to assume that algorithms have universal effects and that conclusions about “algorithmic power” in the Global North apply unproblematically every-where else. We begin by clarifying how Latin American scholars and other research traditions have theorized the popular (“lo…
Fluid agency in relation to algorithms: Tensions, mediations, and transversalities
This paper argues for a fluid approach to the study of agency in relation to algorithms, one that promotes crossing the boundaries of established analytical positions and breaking away from dualistic forms to frame its study. Building on various intellectual traditions, we develop three sensibilities for implementing such an approach: (a) working with tensions as an alternative to thinking about algorithmic power and human agency as an either/or …
Algorithmic governmentality in Latin America: Sociotechnical imaginaries, neocolonial soft power, and authoritarianism
Latin America stands as one of the most unequal regions globally, where economic and social crises persist regardless of the ideological leanings of the ruling governments. Many countries in the region grapple with pervasive issues such as corruption, impunity, and a lack of adherence to the rule of law. In this context of generalized crisis, governments have turned to discourses of innovation and technological progress to justify their actions, …
Algorithms as facts and fabrications: Ethnographic stories of factishes from the Costa Rican Caribbean
How do algorithms shape the experience of facts? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Limón, Costa Rica, this paper explores the role of algorithms in mediating three kinds of “factishes”: data truths, affective facts, and mystic revelations. The article unfolds as a series of stories that capture the interactions between Costa Ricans and the algorithms of social media platforms. To analyze these relationships, we develop a "ventriloquist" ethnog…
Beyond concepts as tokens: Heuristic value and epistemic politics in the study of digital subalterns
In this article we want to question the adequacy of existing concepts and frameworks for understanding experiences with digital technologies in the Global South. First, we describe how concepts acquire value, positioning them within geographical, epistemic, and political realities. Second, we ask about the pertinence of these concepts in describing subaltern practices in the digital world. Third, we identify an urgent need to go beyond digital-ce…
Beyond the tropicalization of concepts: Theorizing digital realities with and from the Global South (introduction to a special issue)
In this introductory section of the special issue titled “Beyond the Tropicalization of Concepts: Theorizing Digital Realities With and From the Global South,” the editors present a critical examination of the unquestioned adoption of theoretical frameworks from dominant regions of power and knowledge in the context of the Global South. This process, referred to as the “tropicalization of concepts,” is scrutinized for its consequences, which incl…
Toward a popular theory of algorithms
This paper establishes dialogs between theories on the popular and critical studies on algorithms and datafication. In doing so, it contributes to reversing the analytical tendency to assume that algorithms have universal effects and that conclusions about “algorithmic power” in the Global North apply unproblematically everywhere else. We begin by clarifying how Latin American scholars and other research traditions have theorized the popular (“lo…
Everyday anthropo-scenes: A Visual Inventory of Human Traces
Presenting an inventory of discarded Adhesive Bandages (ABs) in the city, this visual essay reflects on the pervasive presence of human traces, using the figure of anthropo-scenes. The ABs become a visual metaphor - what used to be a momentary relief for pain, a protective layer, turns into a reminder of the active role humans are playing in the earth's destruction, a reminder of the tension between human power and their own fragility
WhatsApp as 'technology of life': Reframing research agendas
In this paper, we present a few ethnographic vignettes on the use of WhatsApp from a study in Mexico City. We suggest WhatsApp is a paradigmatic example of how a particular technology becomes an infrastructure to sustain, and therefore shape, a wide range of quotidian activities, from personal to economic, from spiritual to political. WhatsApp exemplifies what we call technologies of life, as such technologies mediate almost all aspects of social…
Image-sharing and iconicity on social media during the Catalan conflict (2017)
The aim of this article is to analyse the role that images have played in the Catalan conflict, using the pictures produced in the days surrounding the independence referendum in Barcelona as a case study. As part of an ongoing research agenda on the role of images in social media, our goal is to develop a framework for the analysis of visual practices on social media in the course of creating and re-signifying images. The pictures analysed were …
Black Screens: A Visual Essay on Mobile Screens in the City
This visual essay, along with the Black Screens photographic series upon which it is based, has two aims. On the one hand, it is intended as a visual exploration of the increasingly central role that mobile phones have in our everyday lives. In a time when digital technologies are ubiquitous in urban settings of developed countries, the images reflect, visually, on what this pervasiveness looks like. The other aim is to present suggestions of how…
Not just a number? Neets, data and datalogical systems
This paper draws on empirical research with NEET populations (16–24-year-olds not in education, employment or training) in the U.K. in order to engage with issues around identification, data and metrics produced through datalogical systems. Our aim is to bridge contemporary discourses around data, digital bureaucracy and datalogical systems with empirical material drawn from a long-term ethnographic project with NEET groups in Leeds, U.K. in orde…
Mobile screens and the public event: Screen practices at the Anzac Day Dawn Service
Following current literature on public and mobile screens, this paper discuses the relevance that screens have in our everyday lives by focusing on the combination of mobile and temporary screen-based practices in the digital mediation of a single public commemorative event. We present an ethnographic account of different screen practices at the Anzac Day dawn Service, an annual Australian commemorative ceremony on a public holiday, 25 April. By …
Macías-Rojas, Patrisia, From Deportation to Prison: The Politics of Immigration Enforcement in Post-Civil Rights America
Datafication and data fiction: Narrating data and narrating with data
Data do not speak for themselves. Data must be narrated-put to work in particular contexts, sunk into narratives that give them shape and meaning, and mobilized as part of broader processes of interpretation and meaning-making. We examine these processes through the lens of ethnographic practice and, in particular, ethnography's attention to narrative processes. We draw on a particular case in which digital data must be animated and narrated by d…
Refiguring Techniques in Digital Visual Research
This book interrogates how new digital-visual techniques and technologies are being used in emergent configurations of research and intervention. It discusses technological change and technological possibility; theoretical shifts toward processual paradigms; and a respectful ethics of responsibility. The contributors explore how new and evolving digital-visual technologies and techniques have been utilized in the development of research, and refl…
Trajectories: Digital/visual data on the move
This article presents an outline of the concept ‘Trajectory’. I propose to understand trajectory not only as a trace of movement in a path but also as a working concept to reflect on the possibilities of visual/digital data collection for ethnographic research on the move. Images, I argue, along with some digital affordances such as metadata and GPS, can be a powerful device for ethnographic enquiry and a useful tool for reflexivity if used by ma…
Im]mobility in the age of [im]mobile phones: Young Neets and digital practices
This article draws on research with young NEETs (not in education, employment or training) in Leeds in order to contest the assumption that technological qualities informing new media devices (here mobile phones) simply or transparently translate into social or ontological categories. We draw on a long-term ethnographic study of NEET individuals to argue that one of the underpinning principles of mobile phones – that they pertain to mobility and …
Hackathons, data and discourse: Convolutions of the data (logical)
This paper draws together empirical findings from our study of hackathons in the UK with literature on big data through three interconnected frameworks: data as discourse, data as datalogical and data as materiality. We suggest not only that hackathons resonate the wider socio-technical and political constructions of (big) data that are currently enacted in policy, education and the corporate sector (to name a few), but also that an investigation…
Selfies beyond self-representation: The (theoretical) f(r)ictions of a practice
Drawing on a wide corpus of ethnographic research projects, including on photography practices, young filmmakers and writers, and current research with young unemployed people, we argue that contemporary understandings of selfies either in relation to a “documenting of the self” or as a neoliberal (narcissistic) identity affirmation are inherently problematic. Instead, we argue that selfies should be understood as a wider social, cultural, and me…
Selfies, Image and the Re-making of the Body
This article explores the relationality between women's bodies and selfies on NSFW (Not Safe For Work) tumblr blogs. We consider the way selfie practices engage with normative, ageist and sexist assumptions of the wider culture in order to understand how specific ways of looking become possible. Women's experiences of their bodies change through interactions, sense of community and taking and sharing selfies. This article provides an empirical el…
Digital Ethnography and Media Practices
This chapter deals with ethnographic methodologies used when studying digital media, social contexts, and cultural practices. The chapter starts with an introduction to ethnography and its challenges when going digital. It then provides an overview of the different approaches to digital ethnography depending on the object of study: (1) the ethnography of online communities, virtual worlds, and social media sites; (2) the connective ethnography pr…
Datafication and data fiction: Narrating data and narrating with data
Data do not speak for themselves. Data must be narrated-put to work in particular contexts, sunk into narratives that give them shape and meaning, and mobilized as part of broader processes of interpretation and meaning-making. We examine these processes through the lens of ethnographic practice and, in particular, ethnography's attention to narrative processes. We draw on a particular case in which digital data must be animated and narrated by d…
Selfies, Image and the Re-making of the Body
This article explores the relationality between women's bodies and selfies on NSFW (Not Safe For Work) tumblr blogs. We consider the way selfie practices engage with normative, ageist and sexist assumptions of the wider culture in order to understand how specific ways of looking become possible. Women's experiences of their bodies change through interactions, sense of community and taking and sharing selfies. This article provides an empirical el…
Creation and Control in the Photographic Process: IPhones and the emerging fifth moment of photography
This article underlines some aspects that relate, on the one side, to the technological devices necessary to photography production and, on the other, the kind of practices that shape and are shaped by those devices. It discusses how those relationships have shaped different visual regimes. Based on theoretical approaches like Science and Technology Studies (STS) and the Socio-technical Interactions Network (STIN) perspective, the article starts …
Toward a popular theory of algorithms
This paper establishes dialogs between theories on the popular and critical studies on algorithms and datafication. In doing so, it contributes to reversing the analytical tendency to assume that algorithms have universal effects and that conclusions about “algorithmic power” in the Global North apply unproblematically everywhere else. We begin by clarifying how Latin American scholars and other research traditions have theorized the popular (“lo…
Selfies beyond self-representation: The (theoretical) f(r)ictions of a practice
Drawing on a wide corpus of ethnographic research projects, including on photography practices, young filmmakers and writers, and current research with young unemployed people, we argue that contemporary understandings of selfies either in relation to a “documenting of the self” or as a neoliberal (narcissistic) identity affirmation are inherently problematic. Instead, we argue that selfies should be understood as a wider social, cultural, and me…
Beyond the tropicalization of concepts: Theorizing digital realities with and from the Global South (introduction to a special issue)
In this introductory section of the special issue titled “Beyond the Tropicalization of Concepts: Theorizing Digital Realities With and From the Global South,” the editors present a critical examination of the unquestioned adoption of theoretical frameworks from dominant regions of power and knowledge in the context of the Global South. This process, referred to as the “tropicalization of concepts,” is scrutinized for its consequences, which incl…
Hackathons, data and discourse: Convolutions of the data (logical)
This paper draws together empirical findings from our study of hackathons in the UK with literature on big data through three interconnected frameworks: data as discourse, data as datalogical and data as materiality. We suggest not only that hackathons resonate the wider socio-technical and political constructions of (big) data that are currently enacted in policy, education and the corporate sector (to name a few), but also that an investigation…
Black Screens: A Visual Essay on Mobile Screens in the City
This visual essay, along with the Black Screens photographic series upon which it is based, has two aims. On the one hand, it is intended as a visual exploration of the increasingly central role that mobile phones have in our everyday lives. In a time when digital technologies are ubiquitous in urban settings of developed countries, the images reflect, visually, on what this pervasiveness looks like. The other aim is to present suggestions of how…
Im]mobility in the age of [im]mobile phones: Young Neets and digital practices
This article draws on research with young NEETs (not in education, employment or training) in Leeds in order to contest the assumption that technological qualities informing new media devices (here mobile phones) simply or transparently translate into social or ontological categories. We draw on a long-term ethnographic study of NEET individuals to argue that one of the underpinning principles of mobile phones – that they pertain to mobility and …
Algorithmic governmentality in Latin America: Sociotechnical imaginaries, neocolonial soft power, and authoritarianism
Latin America stands as one of the most unequal regions globally, where economic and social crises persist regardless of the ideological leanings of the ruling governments. Many countries in the region grapple with pervasive issues such as corruption, impunity, and a lack of adherence to the rule of law. In this context of generalized crisis, governments have turned to discourses of innovation and technological progress to justify their actions, …
Algorithms as facts and fabrications: Ethnographic stories of factishes from the Costa Rican Caribbean
How do algorithms shape the experience of facts? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Limón, Costa Rica, this paper explores the role of algorithms in mediating three kinds of “factishes”: data truths, affective facts, and mystic revelations. The article unfolds as a series of stories that capture the interactions between Costa Ricans and the algorithms of social media platforms. To analyze these relationships, we develop a "ventriloquist" ethnog…
Everyday anthropo-scenes: A Visual Inventory of Human Traces
Presenting an inventory of discarded Adhesive Bandages (ABs) in the city, this visual essay reflects on the pervasive presence of human traces, using the figure of anthropo-scenes. The ABs become a visual metaphor - what used to be a momentary relief for pain, a protective layer, turns into a reminder of the active role humans are playing in the earth's destruction, a reminder of the tension between human power and their own fragility
Beyond concepts as tokens: Heuristic value and epistemic politics in the study of digital subalterns
In this article we want to question the adequacy of existing concepts and frameworks for understanding experiences with digital technologies in the Global South. First, we describe how concepts acquire value, positioning them within geographical, epistemic, and political realities. Second, we ask about the pertinence of these concepts in describing subaltern practices in the digital world. Third, we identify an urgent need to go beyond digital-ce…
Image-sharing and iconicity on social media during the Catalan conflict (2017)
The aim of this article is to analyse the role that images have played in the Catalan conflict, using the pictures produced in the days surrounding the independence referendum in Barcelona as a case study. As part of an ongoing research agenda on the role of images in social media, our goal is to develop a framework for the analysis of visual practices on social media in the course of creating and re-signifying images. The pictures analysed were …
Mobile screens and the public event: Screen practices at the Anzac Day Dawn Service
Following current literature on public and mobile screens, this paper discuses the relevance that screens have in our everyday lives by focusing on the combination of mobile and temporary screen-based practices in the digital mediation of a single public commemorative event. We present an ethnographic account of different screen practices at the Anzac Day dawn Service, an annual Australian commemorative ceremony on a public holiday, 25 April. By …
Some ethnographic notes on a Flickr group
This paper presents a number of examples from ethnographic fieldwork with a group of amateur photographers in Barcelona. Based on Practice Theory approach, as a theoretical framework, the article stands as an example of the study of photography that moves away from a representational or semiotic approach towards a performative one. The examples described show how different practices enable and enhance mediations that are material, visual and digi…
Trayectorias (sobre ruedas): Un Ensayo Visual Sobre Los Carritos De Supermercado en La Ciudad
El siguiente trabajo es un breve bosquejo de las posibilidades del concepto de trabajo "trayectoria". Una trayectoria no es sólo, en el sentido literal del término, el trazo del movimiento sobre un camino, sino que busca establecer una reflexión sobre las posibilidades de recolección de registros visuales/digitales/móviles para la investigación etnográfica desde la aleatoriedad del movimiento por la ciudad. El concepto de trayectoria busca dialog…
Cuerpo privado, imagen pública: El autorretrato en la práctica de la fotografía digital
El artículo propone una reflexión sobre el autorretrato como práctica cada vez más extendida en Internet, no sólo para la presentación del usuario en los contextos sociales de interacción, como las fotos que acompañan el perfil personal en las redes sociales, sino también como práctica creativa, lúdica o auto-reflexiva sobre sí, el cuerpo y la identidad personal. Para algunos autores, la práctica del autorretrato está relacionada con formas de co…
Apuntes Sobre La Realidad Como Marco Teórico Para El Estudio De La Comunicación Mediada Por Computadora
Conceptos clave de la vida cotidiana sufren transformaciones en su apropiación debido a los cambios que las NTIC establecen, principalmente la tecnologización y virtualización de espacios privados. De acuerdo con lo anterior, el texto reflexiona acerca de la concepción que se tiene del término realidad partiendo de las coordenadas tiempo y espacio, y realiza un pequeño recuento de los estudios que se han efectuado alrededor de la CMC, con lo que …
Creation and Control in the Photographic Process: IPhones and the emerging fifth moment of photography
This article underlines some aspects that relate, on the one side, to the technological devices necessary to photography production and, on the other, the kind of practices that shape and are shaped by those devices. It discusses how those relationships have shaped different visual regimes. Based on theoretical approaches like Science and Technology Studies (STS) and the Socio-technical Interactions Network (STIN) perspective, the article starts …
Cuerpo privado, imagen pública: El autorretrato en la práctica de la fotografía digital
El artículo propone una reflexión sobre el autorretrato como práctica cada vez más extendida en Internet, no sólo para la presentación del usuario en los contextos sociales de interacción, como las fotos que acompañan el perfil personal en las redes sociales, sino también como práctica creativa, lúdica o auto-reflexiva sobre sí, el cuerpo y la identidad personal. Para algunos autores, la práctica del autorretrato está relacionada con formas de co…
Digital Ethnography and Media Practices
This chapter deals with ethnographic methodologies used when studying digital media, social contexts, and cultural practices. The chapter starts with an introduction to ethnography and its challenges when going digital. It then provides an overview of the different approaches to digital ethnography depending on the object of study: (1) the ethnography of online communities, virtual worlds, and social media sites; (2) the connective ethnography pr…
Some ethnographic notes on a Flickr group
This paper presents a number of examples from ethnographic fieldwork with a group of amateur photographers in Barcelona. Based on Practice Theory approach, as a theoretical framework, the article stands as an example of the study of photography that moves away from a representational or semiotic approach towards a performative one. The examples described show how different practices enable and enhance mediations that are material, visual and digi…
Trayectorias (sobre ruedas): Un Ensayo Visual Sobre Los Carritos De Supermercado en La Ciudad
El siguiente trabajo es un breve bosquejo de las posibilidades del concepto de trabajo "trayectoria". Una trayectoria no es sólo, en el sentido literal del término, el trazo del movimiento sobre un camino, sino que busca establecer una reflexión sobre las posibilidades de recolección de registros visuales/digitales/móviles para la investigación etnográfica desde la aleatoriedad del movimiento por la ciudad. El concepto de trayectoria busca dialog…
Selfies beyond self-representation: The (theoretical) f(r)ictions of a practice
Drawing on a wide corpus of ethnographic research projects, including on photography practices, young filmmakers and writers, and current research with young unemployed people, we argue that contemporary understandings of selfies either in relation to a “documenting of the self” or as a neoliberal (narcissistic) identity affirmation are inherently problematic. Instead, we argue that selfies should be understood as a wider social, cultural, and me…
Selfies, Image and the Re-making of the Body
This article explores the relationality between women's bodies and selfies on NSFW (Not Safe For Work) tumblr blogs. We consider the way selfie practices engage with normative, ageist and sexist assumptions of the wider culture in order to understand how specific ways of looking become possible. Women's experiences of their bodies change through interactions, sense of community and taking and sharing selfies. This article provides an empirical el…
Trajectories: Digital/visual data on the move
This article presents an outline of the concept ‘Trajectory’. I propose to understand trajectory not only as a trace of movement in a path but also as a working concept to reflect on the possibilities of visual/digital data collection for ethnographic research on the move. Images, I argue, along with some digital affordances such as metadata and GPS, can be a powerful device for ethnographic enquiry and a useful tool for reflexivity if used by ma…
Im]mobility in the age of [im]mobile phones: Young Neets and digital practices
This article draws on research with young NEETs (not in education, employment or training) in Leeds in order to contest the assumption that technological qualities informing new media devices (here mobile phones) simply or transparently translate into social or ontological categories. We draw on a long-term ethnographic study of NEET individuals to argue that one of the underpinning principles of mobile phones – that they pertain to mobility and …
Hackathons, data and discourse: Convolutions of the data (logical)
This paper draws together empirical findings from our study of hackathons in the UK with literature on big data through three interconnected frameworks: data as discourse, data as datalogical and data as materiality. We suggest not only that hackathons resonate the wider socio-technical and political constructions of (big) data that are currently enacted in policy, education and the corporate sector (to name a few), but also that an investigation…
Refiguring Techniques in Digital Visual Research
This book interrogates how new digital-visual techniques and technologies are being used in emergent configurations of research and intervention. It discusses technological change and technological possibility; theoretical shifts toward processual paradigms; and a respectful ethics of responsibility. The contributors explore how new and evolving digital-visual technologies and techniques have been utilized in the development of research, and refl…
Not just a number? Neets, data and datalogical systems
This paper draws on empirical research with NEET populations (16–24-year-olds not in education, employment or training) in the U.K. in order to engage with issues around identification, data and metrics produced through datalogical systems. Our aim is to bridge contemporary discourses around data, digital bureaucracy and datalogical systems with empirical material drawn from a long-term ethnographic project with NEET groups in Leeds, U.K. in orde…
Mobile screens and the public event: Screen practices at the Anzac Day Dawn Service
Following current literature on public and mobile screens, this paper discuses the relevance that screens have in our everyday lives by focusing on the combination of mobile and temporary screen-based practices in the digital mediation of a single public commemorative event. We present an ethnographic account of different screen practices at the Anzac Day dawn Service, an annual Australian commemorative ceremony on a public holiday, 25 April. By …
Macías-Rojas, Patrisia, From Deportation to Prison: The Politics of Immigration Enforcement in Post-Civil Rights America
Datafication and data fiction: Narrating data and narrating with data
Data do not speak for themselves. Data must be narrated-put to work in particular contexts, sunk into narratives that give them shape and meaning, and mobilized as part of broader processes of interpretation and meaning-making. We examine these processes through the lens of ethnographic practice and, in particular, ethnography's attention to narrative processes. We draw on a particular case in which digital data must be animated and narrated by d…
Image-sharing and iconicity on social media during the Catalan conflict (2017)
The aim of this article is to analyse the role that images have played in the Catalan conflict, using the pictures produced in the days surrounding the independence referendum in Barcelona as a case study. As part of an ongoing research agenda on the role of images in social media, our goal is to develop a framework for the analysis of visual practices on social media in the course of creating and re-signifying images. The pictures analysed were …
Black Screens: A Visual Essay on Mobile Screens in the City
This visual essay, along with the Black Screens photographic series upon which it is based, has two aims. On the one hand, it is intended as a visual exploration of the increasingly central role that mobile phones have in our everyday lives. In a time when digital technologies are ubiquitous in urban settings of developed countries, the images reflect, visually, on what this pervasiveness looks like. The other aim is to present suggestions of how…
WhatsApp as 'technology of life': Reframing research agendas
In this paper, we present a few ethnographic vignettes on the use of WhatsApp from a study in Mexico City. We suggest WhatsApp is a paradigmatic example of how a particular technology becomes an infrastructure to sustain, and therefore shape, a wide range of quotidian activities, from personal to economic, from spiritual to political. WhatsApp exemplifies what we call technologies of life, as such technologies mediate almost all aspects of social…
Everyday anthropo-scenes: A Visual Inventory of Human Traces
Presenting an inventory of discarded Adhesive Bandages (ABs) in the city, this visual essay reflects on the pervasive presence of human traces, using the figure of anthropo-scenes. The ABs become a visual metaphor - what used to be a momentary relief for pain, a protective layer, turns into a reminder of the active role humans are playing in the earth's destruction, a reminder of the tension between human power and their own fragility
Toward a popular theory of algorithms
This paper establishes dialogs between theories on the popular and critical studies on algorithms and datafication. In doing so, it contributes to reversing the analytical tendency to assume that algorithms have universal effects and that conclusions about “algorithmic power” in the Global North apply unproblematically everywhere else. We begin by clarifying how Latin American scholars and other research traditions have theorized the popular (“lo…
Beyond concepts as tokens: Heuristic value and epistemic politics in the study of digital subalterns
In this article we want to question the adequacy of existing concepts and frameworks for understanding experiences with digital technologies in the Global South. First, we describe how concepts acquire value, positioning them within geographical, epistemic, and political realities. Second, we ask about the pertinence of these concepts in describing subaltern practices in the digital world. Third, we identify an urgent need to go beyond digital-ce…
Beyond the tropicalization of concepts: Theorizing digital realities with and from the Global South (introduction to a special issue)
In this introductory section of the special issue titled “Beyond the Tropicalization of Concepts: Theorizing Digital Realities With and From the Global South,” the editors present a critical examination of the unquestioned adoption of theoretical frameworks from dominant regions of power and knowledge in the context of the Global South. This process, referred to as the “tropicalization of concepts,” is scrutinized for its consequences, which incl…
Rumo a uma teoria popular de algoritmos
his paper establishes dialogs between theories on the popular and critical studies on algorithms and datafication. In doing so, it contributes to reversing the analytical tendency to assume that algorithms have universal effects and that conclusions about “algorithmic power” in the Global North apply unproblematically every-where else. We begin by clarifying how Latin American scholars and other research traditions have theorized the popular (“lo…
Fluid agency in relation to algorithms: Tensions, mediations, and transversalities
This paper argues for a fluid approach to the study of agency in relation to algorithms, one that promotes crossing the boundaries of established analytical positions and breaking away from dualistic forms to frame its study. Building on various intellectual traditions, we develop three sensibilities for implementing such an approach: (a) working with tensions as an alternative to thinking about algorithmic power and human agency as an either/or …
Sociology (22 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · Political science (14 works) · Ethnography (11 works) · Art (10 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · Politics (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Anthropology (7 works)