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, information disorder 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 and cultures that foster more just futures? What can be learned from First Nations media, intersectional voices online, refugee media interventions, community media and more?

Stream Convenors: Michael Richardson and Andrew Brooks

The Future Technologies stream seeks to make sense of technologies in the making, grappling with the complex interplay between visions of the future and historical materialities. Future Technologies conjoins theory and empiricism to generate critical analyses attuned to questions of power, economy, governance, aesthetics, and embodied experience. Traversing sites and situations of war, surveillance, automation, AI, work, ecology, and resistance, Future Technologies aims to excavate the underlying structures, technics, processes, and politics that propose and produce distinct futurities. Grounded in media, cultural, and science and technology studies, Future Technologies adopts a promiscuous, speculative, and pragmatic approach to theory-building that takes seriously the world-making capacities of media technologies and technicities.

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.