[Air-L] Invitation_Workshop on Indigenous Communities & Digital Media

[Martina Di Tullio]

Time: November 5th, 2025 at 8pm (CET) - 3pm (Buenos Aires) - 2pm (Ottawa) -
11am (Vancouver)

Location: Online

Registration: https://forms.gle/ux8RFWQvYg6J9PV7A

With this call, we invite practitioners, academics, and activists who work
from and alongside Indigenous communities on digital media, most broadly
conceived, to join us for an online workshop to share ideas, insights, and
challenges with one another. We are non-Indigenous academics working
alongside Quechua and Inuit communities in Argentina and Canada. It is our
intention to create a space for forming reciprocal relationships across
projects and locations. We would like to bring together people from diverse
backgrounds to discuss shared concerns and interests in this field, join
our forces, and raise awareness of each others’ work, positions,
experiences, and uncertainties.

We believe that the concerns and practices of Indigenous peoples are not
well represented in current discussions about the politics of digitization,
although these standpoints are needed to understand its role in how people
relate to each other and the world. While big tech fastens its grip on more
and more areas of everyday life, and “data colonialism” (Mejias and Couldry
2024) and a push toward extractive AI technologies seems to be the sign of
the times, this development is arguably not a new experience for many
Indigenous peoples around the world who have been dealing with similar
corporate colonialist strategies for centuries. Galloway (2012) argues that
computers are “ethical machines” that make certain ideologies of
objectification, individualization, calculability, and compartmentalization
the very basis of everyday economic, social, and political processes. At
the same time, Indigenous actors are at the forefront pushing for
sovereignty over data and infrastructure to contend with extractivism that
encroaches upon both data and land. In this situation, how are these
multi-layered digital logics understood by Indigenous actors? How do they
engage with digital technologies in the face of their colonizing
tendencies? And how do Indigenous peoples leverage them to pursue their own
cultural, economic, and political priorities?

In this workshop, we aim to create a space for collective reflection rather
than privileging formal presentations. To that end, we are organizing an
online meeting structured in two parts. In the first part, participants are
invited to select an image as a starting point for a brief (10-minute)
story related to their research, experiences, and/or concerns on the topic.
This initial segment is intended to set the tone for the encounter and help
identify shared issues. In the second part, we will revisit the questions
that emerged, engaging in a collective discussion to exchange perspectives,
articulate challenges, offer advice, and develop ideas collaboratively. The
goal is to establish a set of common concerns that can serve as a basis for
further work.

If you are interested in participating, please submit a short (e.g. 300
words) description of your intended story/presentation, a short biography,
and a brief description of the themes and questions you would like to
discuss with others (if any) before October 5th through this form:
https://forms.gle/ux8RFWQvYg6J9PV7A

We are inviting anyone who would like to be in conversation about themes
surrounding Indigenous communities and digital media, including:


   -

   Everyday realities and challenges of digital media in Indigenous
   communities
   -

   Indigenous governance of media infrastructures
   -

   Indigenous media-making practices
   -

   Land relations and digital media
   -

   Digital media in the context of Indigenous media histories
   -

   Indigenous and tech temporalities
   -

   Online sociality in Indigenous communities
   -

   Arts, crafts, and culture in digital spaces
   -

   Colonial tendencies of digital technologies in Indigenous communities
   -

   Digital media and self-determination/sovereignty
   -

   Indigenous online activism
   -

   Digital media and Indigenous well-being
   -

   Digital sovereignty and infrastructures


Organizers:
Jonathan Spellerberg - University of Groningen j.spellerberg at rug.nl
<j.spellerberg at rug.nl>
Martina Di Tullio - University of Buenos Aires ditulliomartina at gmail.com