Mirca Madianou
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 277156 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Mirca Madianou |
| PRENOMES | Mirca |
| SOBRENOME | Madianou |
| ASSINATURA | MADIANOU M |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Goldsmiths University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6087-8411 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 29 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 468 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 29 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2005 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
Digital Identity, Datafication and Epidermalisation in Mae La Refugee Camp
Biometric cash transfers are becoming ubiquitous in the aid sector driven by donor demands for audit and cost efficiencies and as humanitarian organisations turn to technological solutions to address complex logistical challenges. What is often overlooked is the perspective of refugees themselves. Drawing on a mixed-methods study including 80 interviews and participatory action research, our paper examines biometric cash transfers as exemplars of…
The Infrastructural Violence of the Usaid Data Capture
This paper traces the consequences of the decimation of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) for a refugee camp along the border between Thailand and Myanmar. Events in Washington DC in January 2025, had devastating effects in Mae La camp as medical care and other essential services were withdrawn overnight. A less discussed dimension of the crisis concerns the potential harms resulting from the capture of refugee sensitive data. T…
Surreptitious Experimentation
The humanitarian sector is known for its reliance on technological pilots as part of the digitisation and datafication of aid operations. Drawing on ten years of research in the aid sector, this paper outlines a new type of technological experimentation which I term surreptitious experimentation. This type of experimentation is possible as digital technologies and practices become enmeshed with the infrastructures of aid. This process of infrastr…
Contesting Technocolonialism? The 'Ordinary Transcripts' of Everyday Resistance
This paper investigates the extent to which marginalized communities contest practices of datafication and technological experimentation which are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in the aid sector. Drawing on seven years of research in the humanitarian and development sectors, the paper explores forms of resistance to digital aid practices. The paper is divided into two parts. The first section observes how datafication and digital innovation in…
Analyzing the Platform Economy – Feudalism, Medievalism and Colonialism as Useful Frameworks
The platform economy challenges existing economic systems, social interactions and participation as well as the very foundation of democracy. As data is replacing labor as the central economic good, economy, society, class structures and democracy might change fundamentally. Or we might experience old wine on new bottles. Karl Marx famously said that history tends to repeat itself, first as comedy, later as tragedy. In this panel we ask, whether …
Polymedia life
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Nonhuman humanitarianism
Artificial intelligence (AI) applications have been introduced in humanitarian operations in order to help with the significant challenges the sector is facing. This article focuses on chatbots which have been proposed as an efficient method to improve communication with, and accountability to affected communities. Chatbots, together with other humanitarian AI applications such as biometrics, satellite imaging, predictive modelling and data visua…
Non-Human Humanitarianism
Artificial intelligence (AI) applications such as predictive analytics, forecasting and chatbots are increasingly proposed as solutions to the complex challenges of humanitarian emergencies. This is part of the broad trend of ‘AI for social good’ as well as the wider developments in ‘digital humanitarianism’. The paper develops an interdisciplinary framework that brings together colonial and decolonial theory, the critical inquiry of humanitarian…
The Biometric Lives of Migrants
Biometrics, the technology for measuring, analysing and processing a person’s physiological characteristics, such as their fingerprints, iris or facial patterns, is increasingly used in the management of migrant and refugee flows. This panel interrogates the uses of biometric technologies and the consequences for the lives of migrants and refugees. It asks how biometric data are constituted, what their limitations and biases are, how biometric te…
A Second-Order Disaster? Digital Technologies During the Covid-19 Pandemic
One of the most striking features of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom has been the disproportionate way in which it has affected Black, Asian, ethnic minority, and working class people. In this article, I argue that digital technologies and data practices in the response to COVID-19 amplify social inequalities, which are already accentuated by the pandemic, thus leading to a 'second-order disaster'-a human-made disaster which further t…
Technocolonialism
Digital innovation and data practices are increasingly central to the humanitarian response to recent refugee and migration crises. In this article, I introduce the concept of technocolonialism to capture how the convergence of digital developments with humanitarian structures and market forces reinvigorates and reshapes colonial relationships of dependency. Technocolonialism shifts the attention to the constitutive role that data and digital inn…
The Biometric Assemblage
Biometric technologies are routinely used in the response to refugee crises with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) aiming to have all refugee data from across the world in a central population registry by the end of 2019. The article analyzes biometrics, artificial intelligence (AI), and blockchain as part of a technological assemblage, which I term the biometric assemblage. The article identifies five intersecting logics …
The Appearance of Accountability
New communication technologies are celebrated for their potential to improve the accountability of humanitarian agencies. The response to Typhoon Haiyan in 2013 represents the most systematic implementation of “accountability to affected people” initiatives. Drawing on a year-long ethnography of the Haiyan recovery and 139 interviews with humanitarian workers and affected people, the article reveals a narrow interpretation of accountability as fe…
Ambient co-presence
In this article, I develop an argument about a new type of mediated co-presence termed ‘ambient co-presence’, which is the peripheral, yet intense awareness of distant others made possible through the affordances of ubiquitous media environments. Drawing on a long-term ethnography of UK-based Filipino migrants and their communication practices with their transnational families, I observe the increasing prevalence of an ‘always on’ culture of ubiq…
Polymedia and Ethnography
In this essay I argue that social media need to be understood as part of complex environments of communicative opportunities which I conceptualize as polymedia. This approach shifts our attention from social media as discrete platforms to the ways users navigate environments of affordances in order to manage their social relationships. Ethnography emerges as the most appropriate method to capture the relational dynamics that underpin social media…
Digital Inequality and Second-Order Disasters
This article investigates the intersection of digital and social inequality in the context of disaster recovery. In doing so, the article responds to the optimism present in recent claims about “humanitarian technology” which refers to the empowering uses and applications of interactive technologies by disaster-affected people. Drawing on a long-term ethnography with affected communities recovering from Typhoon Haiyan that hit the Philippines in …
Polymedia
This article develops a new theory of polymedia in order to understand the consequences of digital media in the context of interpersonal communication. Drawing on illustrative examples from a comparative ethnography of Filipino and Caribbean transnational families, the article develops the contours of a theory of polymedia. We demonstrate how users avail themselves of new media as a communicative environment of affordances rather than as a catalo…
Migration and New Media
How do parents and children care for each other when they are separated because of migration? The way in which transnational families maintain long-distance relationships has been revolutionised by the emergence of new media such as email, instant messaging, social networking sites, webcam and texting. A migrant mother can now call and text her left-behind children several times a day, peruse social networking sites and leave the webcam for 12 ho…
Humanitarian Campaigns in Social Media
Social media and social networking sites (SNS) in particular have become popular in current humanitarian campaigns. This article assesses the optimism surrounding the opportunities that SNS communication offers for humanitarian action and for the cultivation of cosmopolitan sensibilities. In order to evaluate the mediation of suffering and humanitarian causes through social media, I argue that we need to understand the architectures of social med…
Migration and new media
The way in which families maintain long distance communication when they are separated because of migration has been revolutionised by the emergence of a variety of internet- and mobile phone-based platforms. These platforms have created a new communicative environment, which the authors call 'polymedia'. This book draws on a long-term ethnographic study of prolonged separation between transnational Filipino migrant mothers in the UK and their le…
Should You Accept a Friends Request From Your Mother? And Other Filipino Dilemmas
This paper uses the concept of 'cutting the network' derived from the work of Marilyn Strathern to examine the relationship between two kinds of social network, that of kinship and the system of friends constructed on social networking sites. Specifically the material comes from a study of Filipina domestic workers and nurses in the UK and their relationship to their left behind children in the Philippines. A bilateral system of kinship can lead …
Migration and the accentuated ambivalence of motherhood
This article is concerned with the impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on Filipina transnational mothers' experience of motherhood, their practices of mothering and, ultimately, their identities as mothers. Drawing on ethnographic research with Filipina migrants in the UK as part of a wider study of Filipino transnational families, this article observes that, despite the digital divide and other structural inequalities, ne…
Beyond the Presumption of Identity? Ethnicities, Cultures, and Transnational Audiences
This chapter contains sections titled: Essentializing Culture – Essentializing Essentialism Domesticating the Global Transnational Audiences: Ambivalence and Reflexivity The Boundary-Making Role of Media New Media and Transnational Audiences: Lifting the Boundaries? Methodological and Theoretical Implications for Audience Studies Conclusions References
News as a looking-glass
This article brings together the literatures on shame and mediation in order to consider whether shame is generated, or amplified, in situations of mediation such as those when people find themselves exposed in the news media. Acknowledging the social nature of shame that presupposes the other’s regard for oneself, and drawing on a revision of Cooley’s concept of the ‘looking-glass self’ to describe the monitoring of the self from the point of vi…
Crafting Love
This paper provides a historical perspective on communication among Filipino transnational families. Before the explosion of communication channels and opportunities accompanying the arrival of mobile telephony, cheap international calls and the Internet in the late 1990s communication between migrant parents and left-behind children was dominated by letters and cassette tapes. For mothers who arrived in the UK in the 1970s, these were the main m…
Mobile phone parenting
The Philippines is an intensely migrant society with an annual migration of one million people, leading to over a tenth of the population working abroad. Many of these emigrants are mothers who often have children left behind. Family separation is now recognized as one of the social costs of migration affecting the global south. Relationships within such transnational families depend on long-distance communication and there is an increasing optim…
Ambient co-presence
In this article, I develop an argument about a new type of mediated co-presence termed ‘ambient co-presence’, which is the peripheral, yet intense awareness of distant others made possible through the affordances of ubiquitous media environments. Drawing on a long-term ethnography of UK-based Filipino migrants and their communication practices with their transnational families, I observe the increasing prevalence of an ‘always on’ culture of ubiq…
Migration and the accentuated ambivalence of motherhood
This article is concerned with the impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on Filipina transnational mothers' experience of motherhood, their practices of mothering and, ultimately, their identities as mothers. Drawing on ethnographic research with Filipina migrants in the UK as part of a wider study of Filipino transnational families, this article observes that, despite the digital divide and other structural inequalities, ne…
Technocolonialism
Digital innovation and data practices are increasingly central to the humanitarian response to recent refugee and migration crises. In this article, I introduce the concept of technocolonialism to capture how the convergence of digital developments with humanitarian structures and market forces reinvigorates and reshapes colonial relationships of dependency. Technocolonialism shifts the attention to the constitutive role that data and digital inn…
The Biometric Assemblage
Biometric technologies are routinely used in the response to refugee crises with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) aiming to have all refugee data from across the world in a central population registry by the end of 2019. The article analyzes biometrics, artificial intelligence (AI), and blockchain as part of a technological assemblage, which I term the biometric assemblage. The article identifies five intersecting logics …
Humanitarian Campaigns in Social Media
Social media and social networking sites (SNS) in particular have become popular in current humanitarian campaigns. This article assesses the optimism surrounding the opportunities that SNS communication offers for humanitarian action and for the cultivation of cosmopolitan sensibilities. In order to evaluate the mediation of suffering and humanitarian causes through social media, I argue that we need to understand the architectures of social med…
Contested Communicative Spaces
The case of the Turkish minority in Greece, a ‘beached’ diaspora and vestige of the Ottoman past, is a peculiar case where the tensions of transnationalism and nationalism intersect and where boundaries are continuously created and negotiated. In order to understand communication in this politicised environment, this article, which is based on interviews with, and participant observation among, Turkish speakers living in Athens, draws on Barth's …
Crafting Love
This paper provides a historical perspective on communication among Filipino transnational families. Before the explosion of communication channels and opportunities accompanying the arrival of mobile telephony, cheap international calls and the Internet in the late 1990s communication between migrant parents and left-behind children was dominated by letters and cassette tapes. For mothers who arrived in the UK in the 1970s, these were the main m…
Digital Inequality and Second-Order Disasters
This article investigates the intersection of digital and social inequality in the context of disaster recovery. In doing so, the article responds to the optimism present in recent claims about “humanitarian technology” which refers to the empowering uses and applications of interactive technologies by disaster-affected people. Drawing on a long-term ethnography with affected communities recovering from Typhoon Haiyan that hit the Philippines in …
News as a looking-glass
This article brings together the literatures on shame and mediation in order to consider whether shame is generated, or amplified, in situations of mediation such as those when people find themselves exposed in the news media. Acknowledging the social nature of shame that presupposes the other’s regard for oneself, and drawing on a revision of Cooley’s concept of the ‘looking-glass self’ to describe the monitoring of the self from the point of vi…
A Second-Order Disaster? Digital Technologies During the Covid-19 Pandemic
One of the most striking features of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom has been the disproportionate way in which it has affected Black, Asian, ethnic minority, and working class people. In this article, I argue that digital technologies and data practices in the response to COVID-19 amplify social inequalities, which are already accentuated by the pandemic, thus leading to a 'second-order disaster'-a human-made disaster which further t…
Should You Accept a Friends Request From Your Mother? And Other Filipino Dilemmas
This paper uses the concept of 'cutting the network' derived from the work of Marilyn Strathern to examine the relationship between two kinds of social network, that of kinship and the system of friends constructed on social networking sites. Specifically the material comes from a study of Filipina domestic workers and nurses in the UK and their relationship to their left behind children in the Philippines. A bilateral system of kinship can lead …
Mediating the nation
Contested Communicative Spaces
The case of the Turkish minority in Greece, a ‘beached’ diaspora and vestige of the Ottoman past, is a peculiar case where the tensions of transnationalism and nationalism intersect and where boundaries are continuously created and negotiated. In order to understand communication in this politicised environment, this article, which is based on interviews with, and participant observation among, Turkish speakers living in Athens, draws on Barth's …
Audience Reception and News in Everyday Life
Although most research on news is ultimately concerned with its impact on society, the question of the news audience has often remained an implied category. News is a heavily researched genre but, comparatively, its audience has not always received as much attention as other aspects: For example, questions of the economy of production, newswork, news sources and representation have been studied intensively as is manifested in the chapters of the …
Beyond the Presumption of Identity? Ethnicities, Cultures, and Transnational Audiences
This chapter contains sections titled: Essentializing Culture – Essentializing Essentialism Domesticating the Global Transnational Audiences: Ambivalence and Reflexivity The Boundary-Making Role of Media New Media and Transnational Audiences: Lifting the Boundaries? Methodological and Theoretical Implications for Audience Studies Conclusions References
News as a looking-glass
This article brings together the literatures on shame and mediation in order to consider whether shame is generated, or amplified, in situations of mediation such as those when people find themselves exposed in the news media. Acknowledging the social nature of shame that presupposes the other’s regard for oneself, and drawing on a revision of Cooley’s concept of the ‘looking-glass self’ to describe the monitoring of the self from the point of vi…
Crafting Love
This paper provides a historical perspective on communication among Filipino transnational families. Before the explosion of communication channels and opportunities accompanying the arrival of mobile telephony, cheap international calls and the Internet in the late 1990s communication between migrant parents and left-behind children was dominated by letters and cassette tapes. For mothers who arrived in the UK in the 1970s, these were the main m…
Mobile phone parenting
The Philippines is an intensely migrant society with an annual migration of one million people, leading to over a tenth of the population working abroad. Many of these emigrants are mothers who often have children left behind. Family separation is now recognized as one of the social costs of migration affecting the global south. Relationships within such transnational families depend on long-distance communication and there is an increasing optim…
Humanitarian Campaigns in Social Media
Social media and social networking sites (SNS) in particular have become popular in current humanitarian campaigns. This article assesses the optimism surrounding the opportunities that SNS communication offers for humanitarian action and for the cultivation of cosmopolitan sensibilities. In order to evaluate the mediation of suffering and humanitarian causes through social media, I argue that we need to understand the architectures of social med…
Migration and new media
The way in which families maintain long distance communication when they are separated because of migration has been revolutionised by the emergence of a variety of internet- and mobile phone-based platforms. These platforms have created a new communicative environment, which the authors call 'polymedia'. This book draws on a long-term ethnographic study of prolonged separation between transnational Filipino migrant mothers in the UK and their le…
Should You Accept a Friends Request From Your Mother? And Other Filipino Dilemmas
This paper uses the concept of 'cutting the network' derived from the work of Marilyn Strathern to examine the relationship between two kinds of social network, that of kinship and the system of friends constructed on social networking sites. Specifically the material comes from a study of Filipina domestic workers and nurses in the UK and their relationship to their left behind children in the Philippines. A bilateral system of kinship can lead …
Migration and the accentuated ambivalence of motherhood
This article is concerned with the impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on Filipina transnational mothers' experience of motherhood, their practices of mothering and, ultimately, their identities as mothers. Drawing on ethnographic research with Filipina migrants in the UK as part of a wider study of Filipino transnational families, this article observes that, despite the digital divide and other structural inequalities, ne…
Polymedia
This article develops a new theory of polymedia in order to understand the consequences of digital media in the context of interpersonal communication. Drawing on illustrative examples from a comparative ethnography of Filipino and Caribbean transnational families, the article develops the contours of a theory of polymedia. We demonstrate how users avail themselves of new media as a communicative environment of affordances rather than as a catalo…
Migration and New Media
How do parents and children care for each other when they are separated because of migration? The way in which transnational families maintain long-distance relationships has been revolutionised by the emergence of new media such as email, instant messaging, social networking sites, webcam and texting. A migrant mother can now call and text her left-behind children several times a day, peruse social networking sites and leave the webcam for 12 ho…
Polymedia and Ethnography
In this essay I argue that social media need to be understood as part of complex environments of communicative opportunities which I conceptualize as polymedia. This approach shifts our attention from social media as discrete platforms to the ways users navigate environments of affordances in order to manage their social relationships. Ethnography emerges as the most appropriate method to capture the relational dynamics that underpin social media…
Digital Inequality and Second-Order Disasters
This article investigates the intersection of digital and social inequality in the context of disaster recovery. In doing so, the article responds to the optimism present in recent claims about “humanitarian technology” which refers to the empowering uses and applications of interactive technologies by disaster-affected people. Drawing on a long-term ethnography with affected communities recovering from Typhoon Haiyan that hit the Philippines in …
The Appearance of Accountability
New communication technologies are celebrated for their potential to improve the accountability of humanitarian agencies. The response to Typhoon Haiyan in 2013 represents the most systematic implementation of “accountability to affected people” initiatives. Drawing on a year-long ethnography of the Haiyan recovery and 139 interviews with humanitarian workers and affected people, the article reveals a narrow interpretation of accountability as fe…
Ambient co-presence
In this article, I develop an argument about a new type of mediated co-presence termed ‘ambient co-presence’, which is the peripheral, yet intense awareness of distant others made possible through the affordances of ubiquitous media environments. Drawing on a long-term ethnography of UK-based Filipino migrants and their communication practices with their transnational families, I observe the increasing prevalence of an ‘always on’ culture of ubiq…
Technocolonialism
Digital innovation and data practices are increasingly central to the humanitarian response to recent refugee and migration crises. In this article, I introduce the concept of technocolonialism to capture how the convergence of digital developments with humanitarian structures and market forces reinvigorates and reshapes colonial relationships of dependency. Technocolonialism shifts the attention to the constitutive role that data and digital inn…
The Biometric Assemblage
Biometric technologies are routinely used in the response to refugee crises with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) aiming to have all refugee data from across the world in a central population registry by the end of 2019. The article analyzes biometrics, artificial intelligence (AI), and blockchain as part of a technological assemblage, which I term the biometric assemblage. The article identifies five intersecting logics …
Non-Human Humanitarianism
Artificial intelligence (AI) applications such as predictive analytics, forecasting and chatbots are increasingly proposed as solutions to the complex challenges of humanitarian emergencies. This is part of the broad trend of ‘AI for social good’ as well as the wider developments in ‘digital humanitarianism’. The paper develops an interdisciplinary framework that brings together colonial and decolonial theory, the critical inquiry of humanitarian…
The Biometric Lives of Migrants
Biometrics, the technology for measuring, analysing and processing a person’s physiological characteristics, such as their fingerprints, iris or facial patterns, is increasingly used in the management of migrant and refugee flows. This panel interrogates the uses of biometric technologies and the consequences for the lives of migrants and refugees. It asks how biometric data are constituted, what their limitations and biases are, how biometric te…
A Second-Order Disaster? Digital Technologies During the Covid-19 Pandemic
One of the most striking features of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom has been the disproportionate way in which it has affected Black, Asian, ethnic minority, and working class people. In this article, I argue that digital technologies and data practices in the response to COVID-19 amplify social inequalities, which are already accentuated by the pandemic, thus leading to a 'second-order disaster'-a human-made disaster which further t…
Analyzing the Platform Economy – Feudalism, Medievalism and Colonialism as Useful Frameworks
The platform economy challenges existing economic systems, social interactions and participation as well as the very foundation of democracy. As data is replacing labor as the central economic good, economy, society, class structures and democracy might change fundamentally. Or we might experience old wine on new bottles. Karl Marx famously said that history tends to repeat itself, first as comedy, later as tragedy. In this panel we ask, whether …
Polymedia life
Preview this article: Polymedia life, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/ps.00051.mad-1.gif
Nonhuman humanitarianism
Artificial intelligence (AI) applications have been introduced in humanitarian operations in order to help with the significant challenges the sector is facing. This article focuses on chatbots which have been proposed as an efficient method to improve communication with, and accountability to affected communities. Chatbots, together with other humanitarian AI applications such as biometrics, satellite imaging, predictive modelling and data visua…
Sociology (20 obras) · Political science (16 obras) · Law (13 obras) · Computer Science (9 obras) · Psychology (9 obras) · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity (7 obras) · Social Media and Politics (7 obras) · Gender Studies (6 obras) · Context (archaeology (5 obras) · Economics (5 obras)