This module is an examination of the interweaving of technology and politics through processes of visualising, mediating, digitalizing, and as a means to imagine what is politically possible.
We will consider technology and its divergent uses as social, and importantly, political practice. Its multiple forms, historical uses, current distribution, and future-oriented developments have been integral to the exercise of both power and resistance. Technology, as political practice, manifests in enactments of authority, surveillance, securitization, and militarization, as well as a means for political expression, socialisation, dissent, activism, and their regulation, curtailment, and suppression. This module will consider various theoretical perspectives and case studies on the subject with a focus on themes of ideology, power, and resistance, and how these are translated and given shape by a range of technological interventions, and interlinked visual, media, and digital cultures.
‘Technologies of Power and Resistance’ draws on media, multimodal and political anthropology, extending from the analogue to the digital. This literature frames the diverse theoretical perspectives on the tension between power and resistance and its entanglement with technology. Moreover, these topics will be explored through ethnographies of mediation and the diverse deployments and everyday mobilizations of print, art, audio, visual, media, and spatial practices, pursuits, and technics to political ends. Through this, we will delve into questions of power and ideology, resistance, surveillance, architectures, cartographies, witnessing, evidencing, social justice and activism, algorithms and digital ecologies, and political imagination. This module will also actively connect to multi-disciplinary and multimodal approaches to accommodate a range of dynamic ethnographic contexts and methodological concerns related to the production, circulation and remixing of political technologies and media.
CW/TW: This module includes content, descriptions, depictions, and
discussions of a highly sensitive nature including but not limited to violence,
injury, assault, atrocity, trauma, death, war, racism and racialization, and
discriminatory attitudes or actions.