University of Naples “L’Orientale” (Italy)

International Conference

Indigenous Resistance in the Digital Age: the Politics of Language, Media and Culture

27-30 October 2021

Convenor: Anna Mongibello 

Over the last decades, the advent of digital and social media has deeply affected and radically transformed the interplay between politics, communication and new technologies. This has had a major impact on how engagement and participation take place in the digital age, as well as on how we tell stories and present ourselves through online platforms and within other networked virtual places (De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2020). The new cyber territories that we inhabit daily involve different configurations of digital communication and social practices, which change significantly on the basis of cultural contexts of interaction, interaction spaces, and semiotic resources. This is even more true when it comes to Indigenous communities across the globe, whose widening use of new media has become “a creative and empowering tool to combat language death, raise political awareness, and ingeniously create Indigenous networks across various geographies” (Menjívar and Chacón 2019: 11). 

As Ahasiw Maskegon-Iskwew, founder of Drumbeats to Drumbytes, highlighted, “the digital realm provides Indigenous communities with an autonomous platform to assert an online presence in the face of colonial catastrophe” (2005). For instance, Indigenous digital activism in response to social and political injustices has reclaimed counter-discursive spaces of resistance in the cybersphere, entering the public arena with digital movements such as #idlenomore (Mongibello 2018), #SOSBLAKAUSTRALIA and #IndigenousDads (Carlson 2019) as well as Facebook posts, Instagram stories, Twitter hashtags, YouTube videos, blogs etc. Indigenous digital media innovators are using Web 2.0 technologies in highly creative digital projects such as CyberPowWow and Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace. 

Such movements, projects and forms of individual digital activism resist power, domination and control by interrogating contemporary colonizing systems and subverting the mainstream narrative of the ‘unmodern Indian’ along with other stereotypes (LaRocque 2010, 2016). New dynamic forms of Indigenous self-determination and network sovereignty (Duarte 2017) through social media, in particular, allow Indigenous people to “agitate, demand political recognition for Indigenous causes, and proffer contesting and challenging views that dismantle colonial preoccupations with Indigenous political unity” (Carlson and Frazer 2016). Indigenous communities are therefore carving out a space for themselves as full participants in the shaping of the cybersphere (Lewis 2016). These digital advancements make a better understanding of the dynamics of digital communication and Indigenous resistance more essential than ever.

The connection between indigeneity and new technologies has recently been investigated from a variety of perspectives, employing several critical lenses and methodologies (Hilder 2017, McCallum et al. 2009, Latufeku 2006, Salazar 2009, Wilson and Stewart 2008, Landzelius 2006) in the fields of Information Studies and Ethnic Studies, mostly. The International Conference “Indigenous Resistance in the Digital Age: the Politics of Language, Media and Culture” aims at broadening the current critical debate on creative Indigenous resistance in digital environments so as to include a combination of theoretical approaches and methodologies that range from Indigenous Studies, Critical Discourse Analysis, Corpus Linguistics, Multimodal Analysis, Media Studies, among others, that may offer new perspectives and insights.

The Conference aims at broadening the current critical debate on creative Indigenous resistance in digital environments so as to include a combination of theoretical approaches and methodologies that range from Indigenous Studies, Critical Discourse Analysis, Corpus Linguistics, Multimodal Analysis, Media Studies, among others, that may offer new perspectives and insights.

Submission Guidelines

All papers must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference. We invite proposals on any topic relevant to the conference theme. Submissions are limited to one abstract per person. Each talk selected for presentation will be allotted 20 minutes followed by 10 minutes of discussion. Abstracts have to be written in English and should not exceed 350 words excluding references. Proposals should include: title of the talk, name of author and affiliation, email address, a short bio-bibliographical sketch (max 100 words) and up to five keywords. All submissions can be made through EasyChair using this link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=inres-2021. The new deadline for abstract submission is September 2, 2021. 

List of Topics

The conference welcomes proposals that investigate linguistic, cultural and social aspects of Indigenous digital activisms at macro and/or micro levels, and the languages of resistance across genres, channels and cyber-environments, drawing from different academic disciplines as well as different critical approaches. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Facebook, Twitter and other social networks as new frontiers for Indigenous activists
• Corpora, annotation schemes and other resources and methods for analyzingIndigenous resistance 
• Linguistic, multimodal, critical analysis of dissent and online struggles
• Metaphors, tropes, narratives and other devices used in Indigenous digital activism on social media
• Language, memory and Indigeneity in virtual worlds
• Sovereignty, Indigenous lands and the cyberspace  
• Online/offline Indigenous self-representations and their multiple expressions 
• Responses to online anti-Indigenous racism 
• Indigenous (self- and other) representations in video-games 
• Contemporary online Indigeneity and global connectivity 
• Indigenous knowledge, artificial intelligence and digital worlds
• Technology and decolonization
• Emancipatory role of digital technology for Indigenous people
• Data, information, connectivity, digital technologies and control 
• Educational technology (e.g., virtual labs, e-learning, mobile apps) for Indigenous languages revitalization
• Indigenous online voices and political participation
• Ancestral languages and cultural heritage in online environments 
• The inclusion of Indigenous viewpoints in developing new technologies
• Indigenous Futurism 
• Digital art as resistance 
• Innovative forms of digital oratory and storytelling 

Invited Speakers

• Bronwyn Carlson, Head of the Department of Indigenous Studies (Macquarie University, Australia)
• Alexandra Georgakopoulou, Professor of Discourse Analysis and Sociolinguistics (King’s College, UK);
• Emma La Rocque, Professor of Indigenous Studies, Cree/Métis activist and poet (University of Manitoba, Canada)

Venue

The conference will be held online 

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to inres2021@gmail.com and amongibello@unior.it