[Air-L] Digital Society Network @ University of Sheffield annual lecture: 'New media, old inequalities', Shakuntala Banaji, LSE, Monday 9th October 4.15pm

[Helen Kennedy]

*New media, old inequalities: Approaching youth, creative politics and
digital media across social class, gender and geography*

Dr Shakuntala Banaji, London School of Economics

Monday 9th October, 4.15 – 5.30pm (followed by book launch & drinks
reception), LT4 The Diamond, University of Sheffield



Over the past seventeen years my research around young people, politics and
creativity has interrogated the role and affordances of new and emerging
digital media in processes of social change. From refugee children
connecting with their peers across Europe through ICQ chat in 2002, through
youth activists in Europe and India deploying social media in politically
progressive or retrograde ways, to young female gamers in the MENA region
selectively hiding and revealing their gender via avatars and play talk
during MMOGs, one common thread has been the ways in which digital media
creates spaces for new politics and new agencies whilst also hiding or
entrenching structural inequalities. But to what extent are we simply doing
the digital wrong? Could its technical affordances be used to overcome
systematic hierarchies, at least online? Do its social affordances simply
enhance the agency of particular social classes in the global south? And
are there ways in which the narrative of the digital in liberation politics
has become yet another enemy of those seeking deeper social structural
transformation? My lecture will attempt to answer these questions in the
context of findings from several major comparative research projects in
Europe, the Middle East and North Africa over the past decade.



*Respondents: *Professor Dorothea Kleine, Theme Lead, Digital, Data and
Innovation, Sheffield Institute for International Development, and
Department of Geography, University of Sheffield (
http://siid.group.shef.ac.uk/team/prof-dorothea-kleine/) and Dr Michalis
Kontopodis, School of Education, University of Sheffield
(*www.sheffield.ac.uk/education/kontopodism
<http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/education/kontopodism>*).



The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception and a launch of the
book *Global
Youth in Digital Trajectories* (2017) edited by Michalis Kontopodis,
Christos Varvantakis and Christoph Wulf (*www.routledge.com/9781138236035
<http://www.routledge.com/9781138236035>* ).



*Biography*

Dr Shakuntala Banaji is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate
Studies in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. She is
Programme Director for the Master’s in Media, Communication & Development
and teaches about world cinema, audiences, international media and the
global south. She is Principal Investigator on the ‘Personalised Media and
Participatory Culture’ project and UK project director for the Horizon 2020
CATCH-EyoU project. Ongoing research addresses the intersection between
socio-political contexts, old and emerging media, identities and
participation, with a focus on the lives of children and young people in
different geographical and class contexts. Her publications include *Reading
Bollywood: Young Viewers and Hindi Films* (Palgrave 2006), *South Asian
Media Cultures* (Anthem Press, 2010), *The Civic Web: Young People, the
Internet and Civic Participation* (MIT Press, 2013) and *Children and Media
in India: Narratives of Class, Agency and Social* Change (Routledge, 2016).
Visit her LSE webpage for more information: http://www.lse.ac.uk/media@lse
/WhosWho/AcademicStaff/ShakuntalaBanaji.aspx.



This event is organised by the Digital Society Network (
https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/faculty/social-sciences/digital-society-network)
in association with Sheffield Institute for International Development’s
Digital Technologies, Data and Innovation (SIID DDI,
http://siid.group.shef.ac.uk/research/digital-technoand-innovation/)
research theme.


Register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/new-media-old-inequalities-ap
proaching-youth-creative-politics-and-digital-media-across-
social-tickets-36305126611

-- 
Professor Helen Kennedy, Chair in Digital Society
Department of Sociological Studies / Faculty of Social Sciences
Elmfield, Northumberland Road
Sheffield S10 2TU
T: 0114 2226488
E: h.kennedy at sheffield.ac.uk

LATEST ARTICLE: *'*The Feeling of Numbers: emotions in everyday engagements
with data and their visualisation
<http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0038038516674675?journalCode=soca>',
*Sociology*, 2017.