Stream Convenors: Sukhmani Khorana and Tanja Dreher

The Media and Social Justice stream aims to imagine and build media futures that are more just than the present or the past. Stream researchers develop interventions, theories and practices to challenge media hierarchies, resurgent racisms, online misogyny and more. The stream foregrounds questions of social justice in the context of rapidly transforming communication technologies, proliferating opportunities for voice and the urgent need for solidarities. Engaged with long standing traditions of media activism and critique through to emergent interests in anticolonial or decolonial methodologies, the politics of listening and witnessing, we ask what are the media practices that foster more just futures? What can be learned from First Nations media, intersectional voices online, refugee media interventions and more?

What would a media theory of the future look like? How might theory create concepts that open onto new possibilities for living with media? How is it already doing this? Too often, media and cultural theory is reactive to the events and pressures of the recent past. But it can be much more. The Future Theory resides in the past and present, both to model what theory can be and to explore what it might become. It takes as its starting point the necessity for situated and attentive practices of theory building and casts a sceptical eye on totalising claims that elide difference, re-instantiate dubious hierarchies or rejected out of hand the knowledges of those outside the mainstream. Future Theory is unruly and earnest, imaginative and rigorous, ambitious and capacious; it looks for collaborative concept building, not the assertion of closed systems. Future Theory is about thinking-feeling into where media is going before we arrive to find the place in ruins.

Stream Convenors: Tanja Dreher and Georgia van Toorn

The Data Justice stream examines the intricate relationship between datafication and social justice, highlighting the politics and impacts of data-driven processes and big data. The Data Justice framework foregrounds social justice questions and the lived expertise of social movements and of communities and individuals most impacted by the increasing influence of data-driven systems across all aspects of social, political, economic and individual life. Data Justice is understood as a ‘movement of movements’, building connections and solidarities across social movements responding to increasingly prevalent data harms and shared injustices.