Milan
Biographic Data
| ID | 30635 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Milan |
| FAMILY NAME | Milan |
| SIGNATURE | MILAN |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Amsterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9314-2889 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 210 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
AI Literacy and the Changing Digital Political Landscape
Delores Phillips and Cultural Studies Association s New Media and Digital Cultures Working Group Co-Host Reed Van Schenck discuss AI literacy, digital politics, and the 2024 US presidential election with authors Elizabeth Losh (William and Mary) and Rita Raley (UC Santa Barbara). This podcast is accompanied by a scholarly commentary by Stefania Milan
Platformized childhood: How app stores construct children’s software audiences through platform governance and industry lore
This article examines how app stores construct children’s software audiences through platform governance strategies and industry practices. Drawing on platform studies, critical childhood studies, and the concept of audience commodity, we use the critical walkthrough method and textual analysis to investigate the material choices of Google Play and Apple App Store . Our comparative analysis of their children-focused stores and developer submissio…
The value of crypto? Sociotechnical imaginaries on cryptocurrency in YouTube content
In less than two decades, cryptocurrency has transformed from being an object of interest for an obscure online community to becoming a digital asset of global appeal. By acknowledging the importance of fictional expectations in the creation of economic value, this study addresses the question: How is the value of crypto imagined? Through quantitative and qualitative coding of 1921 YouTube video transcripts, combined with Exploratory Factor Analy…
Resistance in the data-driven society
Individuals and groups increasingly seek to resist the harms and risks of a data-driven society. This essay explores the possibility of individual and collective resistance vis-à-vis datafication, drawing on examples from across the globe. It shows how infrastructure, political agency, and tactics have changed in response to datafication. It reviews six resistance tactics, distinguishing between “defensive resistance” and “productive resistance”:…
International communication: On the significance of borders in the digital borderless world
In this Dialogue, we reproduce the discussions held during a plenary session that took place during the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) conference organized in Lyon in July 2023. Hosted by Tristan Mattelart, this session brought together four distinguished speakers who have all worked extensively, with different perspectives, on the processes of international communication: Yu Hong, Stefania Milan, Daya K Th…
Data in movement: The Social Movement Society in the Age of Datafication
Data has increased currency in contemporary activism and has become an integral part of the action repertoire of today’s social movements. But data and data infrastructure are not only tools to support a movement’s struggle: they are constitutive parts of the environment in which movements operate, and objects of contention in their own right. These developments challenge scholars of social movements and collective action. How are movements chang…
Against decolonial reductionism: The impact of Latin American thinking on the data decolonization project
This essay argues that Latin American scholarship and movement practice are key to understanding the dynamics of the datafied society and countering its inequities. Examining the sources of inspiration of a frontrunner seeking to decolonize the datafied society - the Big Data from the South Initiative ( BigDataSur) - we review Martín-Barbero's ontological shift from media to mediations, Freire's methodology centring individual agency and empowerm…
Afterword: From Number Politics to Infrastructure Politics
Data infrastructures are the scaffolding of the present. This afterword centres on this claim by broadening the question that animates the special issue - what does lived data politics look like? - to the question of 'where' it is taking place today. It extends the gaze to the systemic transformation subtending contemporary data production, which I term 'governance by data infrastructure.' This pervasive form of number politics represents the mos…
Governing artificial intelligence in the media and communications sector
The article identifies critical blindspots in current European AI policies and explores the impact of AI technologies in the media and communications sector, based on a novel multi-level analytical framework
Hacked Transmissions: Technology and Connective Activism in Italy by Alessandra Renzi
Reviewed by: Hacked Transmissions: Technology and Connective Activism in Italy by Alessandra Renzi Stefania Milan (bio) Hacked Transmissions: Technology and Connective Activism in Italy By Alessandra Renzi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020. Pp. 280. Hacked Transmissions by critical media scholar Alessandra Renzi is a deep dive into the exciting journey of the pirate microtelevision movement known as Telestreet, active in Italy bet…
Governing “European values” inside data flows: Interdisciplinary perspectives
Papers in this special issue Governing “European values” inside data flows: interdisciplinary perspectives Kristina Irion, University of Amsterdam Mira Burri, University of Lucerne Ans Kolk, University of Amsterdam
Latin American perspectives on datafication and artificial intelligence: Traditions, interventions and possibilities
This introductory essay illustrates the context, clarifies the relevance, and outlines the key themes of this Special Issue on “Latin American Perspectives on Datafication and Artificial intelligence”. It starts pointing out that so far, the engagement of Latin American scholarship in the exploration of data technologies and the rise of intelligent systems has been limited. However, it is argued, Latin American traditions in both research and pra…
Bodies not templates”: Contesting dominant algorithmic imaginaries
Through an array of technological solutions and awareness-raising initiatives, civil society mobilizes against an onslaught of surveillance threats. What alternative values, practices, and tactics emerge from the grassroots which point toward other ways of being in the datafied society? Conversing with critical data studies, science and technology studies, and surveillance studies, this article looks at how dominant imaginaries of datafication ar…
Fighting gentrification from the boxing ring: How Community Gyms Reclaim the Right to the City
This article explores ‘community gyms’ as prefigurative counter spaces where sport is experienced as a political practice. Emerging in the framework of political squats in Italy and beyond, community gyms constitute an integral part of today’s right to the city mobilization, with two unique contributions. Firstly, they reclaim the right to leisure space as a fundamental component of the struggle against gentrification. Secondly, they introduce to…
Enter the WhatsApper: Reinventing digital activism at the time of chat apps
This paper investigates how the appropriation of chat apps by social actors is redesigning digital activism and political participation today. To this end, we look at the case of #Unidos Contra o Golpe (United Against the Coup), a WhatsApp “private group” which emerged in 2016 in Florianópolis, Brazil, to oppose the controversial impeachment of the then-president Dilma Rousseff. We argue that a new type of political activist is emerging within an…
Techno-solutionism and the standard human in the making of the Covid-19 pandemic
Quantification is particularly seductive in times of global uncertainty. Not surprisingly, numbers, indicators, categorizations, and comparisons are central to governmental and popular response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This essay draws insights from critical data studies, sociology of quantification and decolonial thinking, with occasional excursion into the biomedical domain, to investigate the role and social consequences of counting broadly d…
Undone Science: Social Movements, Mobilized Publics, and Industrial Transitions by David J. Hess
Reviewed by: Undone Science: Social Movements, Mobilized Publics, and Industrial Transitions by David J. Hess Stefania Milan (bio) Undone Science: Social Movements, Mobilized Publics, and Industrial Transitions. By David J. Hess. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016. Pp. 258. Hardcover $75. Undone Science takes a political sociological approach to science and technology, scientific expertise and knowledge, exploring the contentious nature of innovation…
The Rise of the Data Poor: The Covid-19 Pandemic Seen From the Margins
Quantification is central to the narration of the COVID-19 pandemic. Numbers determine the existence of the problem and affect our ability to care and contribute to relief efforts. Yet many communities at the margins, including many areas of the Global South, are virtually absent from this number-based narration of the pandemic. This essay builds on critical data studies to warn against the universalization of problems, narratives, and responses …
Making (Sense of) Media Innovations
Playing with data and its consequences
The fundamental paradigm shift brought about by datafication alters how people participate as citizens on a daily basis. “Big data” has come to constitute a new terrain of engagement, which brings organized collective action, communicative practices and data infrastructure into a fruitful dialogue. While scholarship is progressively acknowledging the emergence of bottom-up data practices, to date no research has explored the influence of these pr…
Online Surveillance, Censorship, and Encryption in Academia
The Internet and digital technologies have become indispensable in academia. A world without email, search engines, and online databases is practically unthinkable. Yet, in this time of digital dependence, the academy barely demonstrates an appetite to reflect upon the new challenges that digital technologies have brought to the scholarly profession. This forum's inspiration was a roundtable discussion at the 2017 International Studies Associatio…
Big Data from the South(s): Beyond Data Universalism
This article introduces the tenets of a theory of datafication of and in the Souths. It calls for a de-Westernization of critical data studies, in view of promoting a reparation to the cognitive injustice that fails to recognize non-mainstream ways of knowing the world through data. It situates the “Big Data from the South” research agenda as an epistemological, ontological, and ethical program and outlines five conceptual operations to shape thi…
Anonymous
Anonymous identifies an amorphous entity that has been active on the Internet and beyond from 2003 onward. It is a collective label, and a related set of symbols, adopted by several groups and individuals for a variety of goals, ranging from pranking to political activism. Three phases in the evolution of Anonymous can be identified, from prank‐oriented activities to explicitly political ones. Its tactics embrace a combination of disruptive actio…
From data politics to the contentious politics of data
This article approaches the paradigm shift of datafication from the perspective of civil society. Looking at how individuals and groups engage with datafication, it complements the notion of "data politics" by exploring what we call the "contentious politics of data". By contentious politics of data we indicate the bottom-up, transformative initiatives interfering with and/or hijacking dominant processes of datafication, contesting existing power…
Cloud Communities and the Materiality of the Digital
Is the internet free of geography and/or materiality? Can we rely (exclusively) on technology such as the blockchain to solve the socio-political problems of our society? This contribution takes a sociological perspective to reflect on the possibilities and the constraints of technology, exploring the materiality of the cloud and the challenges of tech-enabled self-governance
Big Data from the South(s): Beyond Data Universalism
This article introduces the tenets of a theory of datafication of and in the Souths. It calls for a de-Westernization of critical data studies, in view of promoting a reparation to the cognitive injustice that fails to recognize non-mainstream ways of knowing the world through data. It situates the “Big Data from the South” research agenda as an epistemological, ontological, and ethical program and outlines five conceptual operations to shape thi…
From data politics to the contentious politics of data
This article approaches the paradigm shift of datafication from the perspective of civil society. Looking at how individuals and groups engage with datafication, it complements the notion of "data politics" by exploring what we call the "contentious politics of data". By contentious politics of data we indicate the bottom-up, transformative initiatives interfering with and/or hijacking dominant processes of datafication, contesting existing power…
When Algorithms Shape Collective Action: Social Media and the Dynamics of Cloud Protesting
How does the algorithmically mediated environment of social media restructure social action? This article combines social movement studies and science and technology studies to explore the role of social media in the organization, unfolding, and diffusion of contemporary protests. In particular, it examines how activists leverage the technical properties of social media to develop a joint narrative and a collective identity. To this end, it offer…
Bodies not templates”: Contesting dominant algorithmic imaginaries
Through an array of technological solutions and awareness-raising initiatives, civil society mobilizes against an onslaught of surveillance threats. What alternative values, practices, and tactics emerge from the grassroots which point toward other ways of being in the datafied society? Conversing with critical data studies, science and technology studies, and surveillance studies, this article looks at how dominant imaginaries of datafication ar…
Techno-solutionism and the standard human in the making of the Covid-19 pandemic
Quantification is particularly seductive in times of global uncertainty. Not surprisingly, numbers, indicators, categorizations, and comparisons are central to governmental and popular response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This essay draws insights from critical data studies, sociology of quantification and decolonial thinking, with occasional excursion into the biomedical domain, to investigate the role and social consequences of counting broadly d…
The Rise of the Data Poor: The Covid-19 Pandemic Seen From the Margins
Quantification is central to the narration of the COVID-19 pandemic. Numbers determine the existence of the problem and affect our ability to care and contribute to relief efforts. Yet many communities at the margins, including many areas of the Global South, are virtually absent from this number-based narration of the pandemic. This essay builds on critical data studies to warn against the universalization of problems, narratives, and responses …
At the margins of Internet governance: Grassroots tech groups and communication policy
This article examines grassroots tech groups as civil society media (CSM) actors marginalised in the communications policy debate. We aim to insert these key providers of information communication technology (ICT) infrastructure into discussions on enabling CSM policy agendas. The article maps their policy objectives, traces their connections to broader Internet governance mechanisms and explores their potential roles as policy stakeholders. We c…
Data in movement: The Social Movement Society in the Age of Datafication
Data has increased currency in contemporary activism and has become an integral part of the action repertoire of today’s social movements. But data and data infrastructure are not only tools to support a movement’s struggle: they are constitutive parts of the environment in which movements operate, and objects of contention in their own right. These developments challenge scholars of social movements and collective action. How are movements chang…
Fighting gentrification from the boxing ring: How Community Gyms Reclaim the Right to the City
This article explores ‘community gyms’ as prefigurative counter spaces where sport is experienced as a political practice. Emerging in the framework of political squats in Italy and beyond, community gyms constitute an integral part of today’s right to the city mobilization, with two unique contributions. Firstly, they reclaim the right to leisure space as a fundamental component of the struggle against gentrification. Secondly, they introduce to…
Online Surveillance, Censorship, and Encryption in Academia
The Internet and digital technologies have become indispensable in academia. A world without email, search engines, and online databases is practically unthinkable. Yet, in this time of digital dependence, the academy barely demonstrates an appetite to reflect upon the new challenges that digital technologies have brought to the scholarly profession. This forum's inspiration was a roundtable discussion at the 2017 International Studies Associatio…
Four steps to community media as a development tool
Community media represent a crucial input in development processes, playing an important role in democratisation, social struggles, and awareness raising. But they often face difficulties on the financial and legal levels due to the constraints created by national media laws. This paper shows the link between community communication and human development. It provides suggestions for development advocates and communities regarding advocacy for a p…
The value of crypto? Sociotechnical imaginaries on cryptocurrency in YouTube content
In less than two decades, cryptocurrency has transformed from being an object of interest for an obscure online community to becoming a digital asset of global appeal. By acknowledging the importance of fictional expectations in the creation of economic value, this study addresses the question: How is the value of crypto imagined? Through quantitative and qualitative coding of 1921 YouTube video transcripts, combined with Exploratory Factor Analy…
International communication: On the significance of borders in the digital borderless world
In this Dialogue, we reproduce the discussions held during a plenary session that took place during the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) conference organized in Lyon in July 2023. Hosted by Tristan Mattelart, this session brought together four distinguished speakers who have all worked extensively, with different perspectives, on the processes of international communication: Yu Hong, Stefania Milan, Daya K Th…
At the margins of Internet governance: Grassroots tech groups and communication policy
This article examines grassroots tech groups as civil society media (CSM) actors marginalised in the communications policy debate. We aim to insert these key providers of information communication technology (ICT) infrastructure into discussions on enabling CSM policy agendas. The article maps their policy objectives, traces their connections to broader Internet governance mechanisms and explores their potential roles as policy stakeholders. We c…
Four steps to community media as a development tool
Community media represent a crucial input in development processes, playing an important role in democratisation, social struggles, and awareness raising. But they often face difficulties on the financial and legal levels due to the constraints created by national media laws. This paper shows the link between community communication and human development. It provides suggestions for development advocates and communities regarding advocacy for a p…
The Way is the Goal Interview with Maqui, Indymedia London / IMC-UK Network Activist
Indymedia UK was created in 1999; right after the first Independent Media Center was set up in Seattle in November that year to allow participants to the anti-WTO demonstrations to report from the streets. But it emerged from an earlier website, created by a group of activists to report from the occupation of the City of London in June 18, 1999. Since 1999, the website has kept growing, incorporating technological developments and responding to t…
WikiLeaks, Anonymous, and the Exercise of Individuality: Protesting in the Cloud
When WikiLeaks released the Collateral Murder video in spring 2010, featuring a US army helicopter shooting Iraqi civilians, cyberactivism was not a hot topic in the mainstream media. However, thanks to the ability to leverage the potential of the Internet to influence political debate, WikiLeaks quickly imposed itself as a headline-grabbing organization. The mass media fell in love with WikiLeaks, not least because of its enigmatic nature, its o…
WikiLeaks, Anonymous, and the Exercise of Individuality
Social Movements and Their Technologies: Wiring Social Change
Now in paperback for the first time, Social Movements and their Technologies explores the interplay between social movements and their 'liberated technologies'. It analyzes the rise of low-power radio
From social movements to cloud protesting: The evolution of collective identity
This article develops a conceptual framework for understanding collective action in the age of social media, focusing on the role of collective identity and the process of its making. It is grounded on an interactionist approach that considers organized collective action as a social construct with communicative action at its core [Melucci, A. 1996 Melucci, A. (1996). Challenging codes: Collective action in the information age. Cambridge, MA: Camb…
When Algorithms Shape Collective Action: Social Media and the Dynamics of Cloud Protesting
How does the algorithmically mediated environment of social media restructure social action? This article combines social movement studies and science and technology studies to explore the role of social media in the organization, unfolding, and diffusion of contemporary protests. In particular, it examines how activists leverage the technical properties of social media to develop a joint narrative and a collective identity. To this end, it offer…
The Alternative Epistemologies of Data Activism
As datafication progressively invades all spheres of contemporary society, citizens grow increasingly aware of the critical role of information as the new fabric of social life. This awareness triggers new forms of civic engagement and political action that we term “data activism”. Data activism indicates the range of sociotechnical practices that interrogate the fundamental paradigm shift brought about by datafication. Combining Science and Tech…
Low power to the people: Pirates, protest, and politics in FM radio activism
Cloud Communities and the Materiality of the Digital
Is the internet free of geography and/or materiality? Can we rely (exclusively) on technology such as the blockchain to solve the socio-political problems of our society? This contribution takes a sociological perspective to reflect on the possibilities and the constraints of technology, exploring the materiality of the cloud and the challenges of tech-enabled self-governance
Making (Sense of) Media Innovations
Playing with data and its consequences
The fundamental paradigm shift brought about by datafication alters how people participate as citizens on a daily basis. “Big data” has come to constitute a new terrain of engagement, which brings organized collective action, communicative practices and data infrastructure into a fruitful dialogue. While scholarship is progressively acknowledging the emergence of bottom-up data practices, to date no research has explored the influence of these pr…
Online Surveillance, Censorship, and Encryption in Academia
The Internet and digital technologies have become indispensable in academia. A world without email, search engines, and online databases is practically unthinkable. Yet, in this time of digital dependence, the academy barely demonstrates an appetite to reflect upon the new challenges that digital technologies have brought to the scholarly profession. This forum's inspiration was a roundtable discussion at the 2017 International Studies Associatio…
Big Data from the South(s): Beyond Data Universalism
This article introduces the tenets of a theory of datafication of and in the Souths. It calls for a de-Westernization of critical data studies, in view of promoting a reparation to the cognitive injustice that fails to recognize non-mainstream ways of knowing the world through data. It situates the “Big Data from the South” research agenda as an epistemological, ontological, and ethical program and outlines five conceptual operations to shape thi…
Anonymous
Anonymous identifies an amorphous entity that has been active on the Internet and beyond from 2003 onward. It is a collective label, and a related set of symbols, adopted by several groups and individuals for a variety of goals, ranging from pranking to political activism. Three phases in the evolution of Anonymous can be identified, from prank‐oriented activities to explicitly political ones. Its tactics embrace a combination of disruptive actio…
From data politics to the contentious politics of data
This article approaches the paradigm shift of datafication from the perspective of civil society. Looking at how individuals and groups engage with datafication, it complements the notion of "data politics" by exploring what we call the "contentious politics of data". By contentious politics of data we indicate the bottom-up, transformative initiatives interfering with and/or hijacking dominant processes of datafication, contesting existing power…
Enter the WhatsApper: Reinventing digital activism at the time of chat apps
This paper investigates how the appropriation of chat apps by social actors is redesigning digital activism and political participation today. To this end, we look at the case of #Unidos Contra o Golpe (United Against the Coup), a WhatsApp “private group” which emerged in 2016 in Florianópolis, Brazil, to oppose the controversial impeachment of the then-president Dilma Rousseff. We argue that a new type of political activist is emerging within an…
Techno-solutionism and the standard human in the making of the Covid-19 pandemic
Quantification is particularly seductive in times of global uncertainty. Not surprisingly, numbers, indicators, categorizations, and comparisons are central to governmental and popular response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This essay draws insights from critical data studies, sociology of quantification and decolonial thinking, with occasional excursion into the biomedical domain, to investigate the role and social consequences of counting broadly d…
Undone Science: Social Movements, Mobilized Publics, and Industrial Transitions by David J. Hess
Reviewed by: Undone Science: Social Movements, Mobilized Publics, and Industrial Transitions by David J. Hess Stefania Milan (bio) Undone Science: Social Movements, Mobilized Publics, and Industrial Transitions. By David J. Hess. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016. Pp. 258. Hardcover $75. Undone Science takes a political sociological approach to science and technology, scientific expertise and knowledge, exploring the contentious nature of innovation…
The Rise of the Data Poor: The Covid-19 Pandemic Seen From the Margins
Quantification is central to the narration of the COVID-19 pandemic. Numbers determine the existence of the problem and affect our ability to care and contribute to relief efforts. Yet many communities at the margins, including many areas of the Global South, are virtually absent from this number-based narration of the pandemic. This essay builds on critical data studies to warn against the universalization of problems, narratives, and responses …
Governing “European values” inside data flows: Interdisciplinary perspectives
Papers in this special issue Governing “European values” inside data flows: interdisciplinary perspectives Kristina Irion, University of Amsterdam Mira Burri, University of Lucerne Ans Kolk, University of Amsterdam
Latin American perspectives on datafication and artificial intelligence: Traditions, interventions and possibilities
This introductory essay illustrates the context, clarifies the relevance, and outlines the key themes of this Special Issue on “Latin American Perspectives on Datafication and Artificial intelligence”. It starts pointing out that so far, the engagement of Latin American scholarship in the exploration of data technologies and the rise of intelligent systems has been limited. However, it is argued, Latin American traditions in both research and pra…
Bodies not templates”: Contesting dominant algorithmic imaginaries
Through an array of technological solutions and awareness-raising initiatives, civil society mobilizes against an onslaught of surveillance threats. What alternative values, practices, and tactics emerge from the grassroots which point toward other ways of being in the datafied society? Conversing with critical data studies, science and technology studies, and surveillance studies, this article looks at how dominant imaginaries of datafication ar…
Fighting gentrification from the boxing ring: How Community Gyms Reclaim the Right to the City
This article explores ‘community gyms’ as prefigurative counter spaces where sport is experienced as a political practice. Emerging in the framework of political squats in Italy and beyond, community gyms constitute an integral part of today’s right to the city mobilization, with two unique contributions. Firstly, they reclaim the right to leisure space as a fundamental component of the struggle against gentrification. Secondly, they introduce to…
Sociology (28 works) · Political science (27 works) · Politics (21 works) · Law (19 works) · Social Media and Politics (16 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Social movement (11 works) · Media studies (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Public relations (7 works)