Introduction: Alternetworks and contrapublics in digital activism

Abstract

In recent years Media and Communication disciplinary conferences have begun to highlight the issue of #communicationsowhite (Chakravartty et al., 2018). The International Communication Association has also continued to intensify its efforts at internationalization even as members continue to debate what this “internationalization” would look like in terms of inclusion of historically marginalized populations worldwide. Yet in a larger disciplinary context of knowledge building, our theoretical and methodological constructs are still based in academic hierarchies that privilege the very same Global North ontologies and epistemologies that are universalized under implicit and unspoken assumptions that such constructs are universal and innately democratic. Thus, when attempts are made to include, engage or privilege “Global South” scholars in these venues, the token inclusion that occurs potentially creates further erasures by flattening and invisibilizing historically oppressed groups from the geo-locations identified as located in “the Global South.” Some of this has to do with how we use the north/south binary even as academics, which leads to tokenizing. Our terminologies and self-identifications themselves sometimes create erasures where the very people we want to include get disappeared. For instance, the terminology around the word “activism” is problematized in this special issue by Shakuntala Banaji in her commentary and criticism essay. She cautions us to be vigilant to “the dangers of allowing a warm fuzzy conception of activism to divert attention from the fascist politics being enacted online across vast swathes of the Global South.” Warm fuzzy ideas of what it means to write from and about the Global South are equally problematic.