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Postcolonial Publics: Art and Citizen Media in Europe presents a collection of sixteen chapters that explore the themes of how migrants, refugees and citizens express and share their political and social causes and experiences through art and media. These expressions, which we term ‘citizen media’, arguably become a platform for postcolonial intellectuals as the studies pursued in this volume investigate the different ways in which previously excluded social groups regain public voice. The volume strives to understand the different articulations of migrants’, refugees’, and citizens’ struggle against increasingly harsh European politics that allow them to achieve and empower political subjectivity in a mediated and creative space. In this way, the contributions in this volume present case studies of citizen media in the form of ‘activistic art’ or ‘artivism’ (Trandafoiu, Ruffini, Cazzato & Taronna, Koobak & Tali, Negrón-Muntaner), activism through different kinds of technological media (Chouliaraki and Al-Ghazzi, Jedlowski), such as documentaries and film (Denić), podcasts, music and soundscapes (Romeo and Fabbri, Western, Lazzari, Huggan), and activisms through writings from journalism to fiction (Longhi, Concilio, Festa, De Capitani). The volume argues that citizen media go hand in hand with postcolonial critique because of their shared focus on the deconstruction and decolonisation of Western logics and narratives. Moreover, both question the concept of citizen and of citizenship as they relate to the nation-state and explores the power of media as a tool for participation as well as an instrument of political strength. The book forwards postcolonial artivism and citizen media as a critical framework to understand the refugee and migrant situations in contemporary Europe.

Contemporary feminist scholarship has highlighted the relevance of Hegel’s philosophy for feminist theory and politics. Hegel’s reception in the fields of postcolonial studies, decolonial studies, and critical philosophy of race did not encounter a similar fortune. Most of the contributions from these fields, instead, have polemically engaged with Hegel’s works, with the purpose to elucidate the crucial role that his philosophy played in the conceptualization of racial hierarchies and colonial Eurocentrism that underlie the master narrative of Western modernity. After reconstructing Hegel’s discourse on race(s) across his anthropology, philosophy of history and philosophy of right, this chapter draws on contemporary feminist approaches to Hegel with the aim of examining to what extent such feminist readings may help outlining textual and conceptual strategies for addressing the Hegelian corpus so as to make his contribution valuable for contemporary critical philosophies of race and antiracist theories and practices.

We begin our introduction by situating our special issue Our Bodies Breathe Resistance: COVID19 Stories From/In the Margins within the emergent academic debates around global inequalities, breathing and the body under COVID19 conditions informed by international relations, critical development studies, and anti/post/decolonial feminist scholarship. We do this while articulating our experiential approach to knowing as one that questions false dichotomies between theory and practice. In this way we practice enfleshed and positioned thinking while dialoguing with literature that de-centres from western ‘contemporaneity’ and allows us to display the limits of detached and disembodied thinking in times of COVID19. Guided by the following question: What happens when global inequalities, breathing, and bodies are thought of from a different geo-genealogy to that of western critical feminist antiessentialist approaches we introduce each of the contributors to the special issue organized around the actions of Refusing, Healing, Caring, Eating, and Learning.

With the emergence of facial recognition software, faces are continuously digitized and analyzed through machine vision. While facial recognition appears as an objective and unobtrusive security tool, feminist data scholars have shown that this technology is entangled with structures of power. This chapter explores how critical artistic responses to facial recognition have the potential to activate feminist critiques on the politics of facial recognition in nonverbal, material, and affective ways. Taking Zach Blas’s Face Cages as a case study, the chapter analyzes how the art project uses strategies of defamiliarization to instigate critical reflection and activate an understanding of biometric datafication as a process of capture, which entails a violent reduction of lived experiences of identity and embodiment into biometric capta

This article is derived from a webinar series conversation titled, “Post Philosophies and the Doing of Inquiry,” co-hosted by Candace R. Kuby and Viv Bozalek. The webinar sessions ran from August 2020 to September 2021. This webinar series was made possible by a research collaborative partnership between the University of Missouri System in the United States and the University of the Western Cape (or UWC) in Cape Town, South Africa. The session with Kathrin Thiele took place in April 2021 and the following article is the transcribed conversation with Kathrin Thiele, also including contributions by Deirdre Donoghue and Pınar Türer.

In this chapter, I show how the investigation of racialization in datafied applications can be done through an instrumental, epistemological, and ontological approach to datafication and that the results of each approach do not necessarily match. By analyzing the attempted implementation of a tool aimed at measuring the composition of personnel in terms of migration background called Barometer Culturele Diversiteit (BCD) at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, I show how the tool is using ideas about race (instrumental), shaping knowledge through colonial politics (epistemological), and producing race (ontological) simultaneously. Aided by this analysis, I will advocate for an understanding of the use of raceethnic data for affirmative purposes in terms of strategic essentialism, making epistemic imperfection regarding race warranted only in antiracist data systems working toward their own obsolescence.

Liminagraphy, is a life-affirming approach to research that offers a pathway to decolonial re-existence and collective liberation. Co-created with women of colour and those at the margins of academia, liminagraphy attends to the double erasure of modernity/coloniality, moving away from its politics of representation and into reception where we can become intelligible to each other through our non-dominant differences. Theoretically underpinned by the anti-colonial practices of decolonial feminism, black studies, African philosophy and Chicana Studies, liminagraphy offers a collective relational-ethics orientated towards the sustaining of life. Using poetry, storytelling and podcast as forms of enfleshed theorizing, its creative potential lies in the refusal of taken-for-granted research protocols.

In spite of a range of fundamental issues, biometric surveillance has become an integral part of everyday life. Artists are creating a range of creative responses to the emergence of biometric control that critically interrogate and denormalise it. Most of the existing research in this topic however ignores the exhibitionary context in which surveillance art is usually experienced. This article shifts the analytical perspective to the site of the exhibition in order to attend to the specificity of the artworks’ critical potential – that is influenced by their spatial and narrative context, as well as their juxtaposition with each other. Specifically, it analyses the exhibition Face Value: Surveillance and Identity in the Age of Digital Facial Recognition (2021) as an exemplary case study to discuss how exhibitions can construct a multi-faceted framework through which visitors can get a grip of the ‘society of control’. Drawing on Pisters and Deleuze, this article argues that exhibitions can engender a constellation of ‘circuit breakers’ in which the biometric control of faces is disrupted through a configuration of artistic strategies. In Face Value, these strategies include exposing the black-boxed structures of facial recognition software, showing the human stories behind data and imagining alternative technologies.

This chapter focuses on Syrian refugee women as data subjects in the bureaucratic system of the Dutch immigration services (IND). In an increasingly datafied society many aspects of governance are becoming subject to some form of datafication. The same goes for the decision-making process of the immigration services. Recent research on these processes has mainly focussed on data practices by the European Union in order to protect "Fortress Europe" or use by Syrian refugees themselves of social media and telephone. Media and social research on immigration practices has mainly focussed on inequality and the representation of refugees, in society, in policy-making and in the process of integration. This chapter combines a top-down perspective (data system) with a bottom-up perspective (data subjects) on the IND’s data system by integrating an analysis of data and information about Syrian refugee women present in the IND system with the experiences of the women that provided the information. The result is a moving as well as very informative collection of responses, experiences and insights of five Syrian women refugee women who are in, or have been through the IND’s decision-making process and who speak back to the system, producing alternative knowledge and representations to the dominant and mainstream stories of migration and integration in the Netherlands.

In the Netherlands, data about the spatial distribution of Dutch citizens structured on the basis of their “migration background” is available in governmental open data sets. In this dissertation, such data are called “race-ethnic” for the combined racial and ethnonationalist connotations of the categorizations and labels. I will argue that the appropriation of race-ethnic data for new purposes enables a process of racialization, understood as the selection of “particular human features for purposes of racial signification” (Omi and Winant 2015, 110). To understand how processes of racialization are not only historically and socially determined, but also result from specific technologies, I propose the concept of technologically mediated racialization (TMR). I use TMR in the investigation of the development of past technologies used for counting and clustering people in the Dutch census between 1899 and 2011. I show how race-ethnic categorization is intimately tied to sociocultural ideas about which human characteristics matter, as well as to the available technologies to record, store, and distribute that information. I will trace the historical connection between contemporary Dutch categories and clusters, such as “person with a migration background”, and older categories and clusters, such as “niet-Westerse allochtoon”, and “vreemdeling”. This will allow me to show that contemporary categorization practices are still informed by Dutch colonial history and migration history. As a result, label changes are both unable to solve racializing practices, and, simultaneously, make historical connections between race-ethnic categories and colonial history harder to access. This process can be understood as a form of colonial aphasia: “a loss of access that may verge on active dissociation” (Stoler 2016, 12). In my first two case studies, I show how race-ethnic categories are made available by the data infrastructure of Statistics Netherlands (CBS) and are used in data applications such as the Allochtoon-o-meter of the alt-right weblog Geenstijl, and the Leefbaarometer of the Dutch Ministry of the Interior. While these two systems seem very different, at least in terms of their politics, these data applications inherit the same embedded perspective and normative assumptions about Dutchness already present in the data infrastructure of CBS. Therefore, the results of these applications are no accidental instances of TMR but rather materializations of a technicity of race that was already embedded in both the available technologies and related race-ethnic categories. Furthermore, especially in the case of the Leefbaarometer, the colonial and racialized connotations of the provided information have become obscured as a result of the decontextualizing nature of the process of datafication, worsening the aforementioned colonial aphasia. My third case study, the Crime Anticipation System (CAS), a predictive policing system of the Dutch National Police, shows how even a system that does not use any explicit race-ethnic categories can produce TMR. In a data assemblage that includes both CAS, a system that aims to exploit information about societal inequalities to achieve operational “efficiency”, and an organizational culture that has only minimal protections against ethnic profiling, racialized and racializing results are no accident but an inherent feature of the system. In the conclusions, I show how the concept of TMR can be used in the planning, evaluation, and design processes of current and future governmental practices that are aided by data technologies. In this way, I hope that the results of this investigation are not only aiding in the production of knowledge within the scholarly fields of critical data studies and postcolonial studies, but also in guiding the Netherlands along a process towards a more accountable and just datafied society that values all people equally.

This is a commentary to the Special Issue ‘Textures of Diaspora and (Post-) Digitality: A Cultural Studies Approach’, edited by Shola Adenekan, Julia Borst and Linda Maeding. The commentary reflects on digital diaspora as a travelling concept, and considers the analytic scope of the terms post-migration, post-digital and post-global for digital diasporas studies. I argue digital diaspora studies can be situated in the following continuums: universal-particular, decentring‐recentering, global‐local, inclusion and exclusion as well as media-centrism and non-media-centrism. Future scholarship may listen better to the sounds of digital diasporas and attend to the implications of digital platformization.

This essay stages a critical conversation between Stuart Hall and Ernesto Laclau, comparing their different appropriations of Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. In the 1980s, Hall and Laclau engaged with Gramsci and with one another in order to conceptualize what they regarded as a triangular relation between the rise of Thatcherism, the crisis of the Left, and the emergence of new social movements. While many of their readers emphasize the undeniable similarities and mutual influences that exist between Hall and Laclau, this essay focuses on the differences between their theories of hegemony and locates the starkest contrast between them at the level of theoretical practice. While the main lesson that Hall drew from Gramsci was the privileging of conjunctural analysis, Laclau proceeded to locate the concept of hegemony at a higher level of abstraction, developing a political ontology increasingly indifferent to any specific conjuncture. The essay argues that this difference between conjunctural analysis and political ontology has a significant impact on Hall’s and Laclau’s respective understandings of two key political formations: populism and identity politics. Thus by focusing on these two formations, the essay argues that Hall’s work should not be read as a derivative or even undertheorized version of Laclau’s, for this tendency obscures substantial differences between their interventions as well as the fact that Hall’s theory of hegemony, as a theory of the conjuncture, ultimately possesses stronger explanatory power than Laclau’s political ontology.

This article addresses the smartphone as a complicated technology of forced migration: a device that accompanies those who move, but which also records and catalogues digital traces within life contexts of conflict, uprooting, migration and resettlement. We conceptualise smartphones as personal digital archives: migrants’ curation of their own stories on their own portable devices. Personal digital archives, we argue, reflect the migrant gaze and constitute mobile subaltern subjects’ record of forced migration. Inductively learning from fieldwork conducted across five sites over 5 years, we analyse how the personal digital archive records and reflects the mediation of migration in its three dimensions: symbolic, affective and material. By focussing on personal digital archives, we recentre the authority of migrants as witnessing subjects of their own life stories. Their archives as autonomous migrant records provide a powerful basis to reflect upon and potentially contest mainstream western journalism cultures, which too often reduce migration to a spectacle and the migrant to a dehistoricised figure with little agency or voice.

What does it mean to refuse research during a pandemic? The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to reckon with old wounds and underlying conditions, particularly the ways in which these extreme inequalities are circumvented in research. In addressing pandemic failures the article addresses the ways in which research is complicit and how research has been re-invented under the conditions of the pandemic yet is still under the logics of extractivism and in service of the neoliberal university. Using refusal and abolition as generative theoretical groundings, the article seeks radical alternatives to reclaiming research as practice. Through the retraditioning of knowledges through ancestry, spirituality and positionality we can start to reclaim research as practice. Thus, in our refusal to go back to ‘normal’, practicing research becomes the first step in organizing in anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-colonial and anti-racist ways.

This article consists of a conversation between dr. Domitilla (domi) Olivieri, scholar and activist, and Trinh T. Minh-ha, renowned film-maker, writer, theorist, and professor. Through questions and answers, the piece starts with Trinh’s take on the notion of the intellectual; the dialogue then continues by traversing some of the themes and issues that characterise Trinh’s work as a filmmaker and a scholar: films as forms of political and intellectual intervention; the matter of (diasporic) communities, subjectivities, and locations; how the issue of labels and genres plays out in the film industry; the question of audiences; the film as encounter; politics of knowl-edge productions; matters of time and temporalities. Sustaining the conversation is also an understanding that Trinh’s films do not only address issues of (trans)national movements, encounters, technol-ogies, poetry, and rhythms of lives, but they also enact and perform those very movements. Finally, the article discusses Trinh’s legacies as feminist and postcolonial practices, and the role of criticism and (non)knowing in her work across genres and registers of filmmaking that are complex and poetic, as well as strongly political.

This article stages a confrontation between postcolonial theory and the decolonial option on the terrain of their respective engagements with Marxism. While prominent decolonial critics accuse postcolonial theory of relying too much on ‘Eurocentric’ theories, including Western Marxism, the article argues that this critique ignores what has been in fact a long-standing debate between postcolonial theory and its Marxist critics. Thus, the article questions this decolonial characterization and locates postcolonial theory itself in the crossfire of Marxist and decolonial critiques. First, it outlines the main objections that Marxist critics have formulated against postcolonial theory. Next, it discusses the decolonial critiques of postcolonial theory with an emphasis on the role played by Marxism in this confrontation. Finally, it proposes a ‘relinking’ between postcolonial theory and Marxism, understood not as a closure of the debate between these two theoretical formations but rather as an effort to hold that debate open. The article identifies the space of this open debate between postcolonial theory and its Marxist critics as a vantage point from which to articulate a critical response to the decolonial intervention.

The commentary provides the reader with several genealogies of data and care, key themes that underpin the theorisation, as well as the methodological and ethical operationalisation of a more caring digital migration studies described in this book. By doing that, it shows how pursuing careful data engagement allows understanding and reflection on the “ambivalence and shifting tensions” inherent in care-technology relations. The genealogies discussed show how neither migration nor data nor care are singular totalities but co-exist with limits and paradoxes. This is furthermore important when a caring perspective on data in migration studies is more and more relevant. This relevance is seen as a response to the recent trend of seeing migration as a laboratory where experiments with big data can be conducted and the overarching data ideology that depicts migrations as something that can be controlled through more or better data without having to come to terms with underpinning large-scale historical, socio-cultural, geo-political and economic concerns.

In 2014, the movie Pride written by Stephen Beresford and directed by Matthew Warchus brought to the attention of a national and international general public the story of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM), which had been largely forgotten within the London LGBTQ community itself. LGSM were a solidarity group active in the 1984-85 British miners’ strike. They formed in London a few months into the strike and forged a coalition with the miners based on material support, solidarity, and a shared will to resist the attacks launched by Thatcherism in the 1980s on organized labor as well as black, feminist, and gay and lesbian communities and movements. Pride was released only a few months after Stuart Hall’s passing in February 2014. Hall has been one of the key interpreters of the 1980s in Britain. His work at the time shed light on the conjunctural triangulation between the rise of Thatcherism, the crisis of the left, and the consolidation of ‘identity’ as a terrain of political struggle broken open by intersecting social movements such as feminism, black power, and lesbian and gay liberation. Despite the powerful resonances that exist between the story of LGSM and Hall’s thinking on the renewal of the left in the 1980s, Hall adopted a very skeptical position on the miners' strike and experience of feminist, black, and lesbian and gay support groups for the miners barely appeared in his analyses. In this article, I interrogate this missed encounter between Hall and LGSM.

Addressing the particular context of China, this article has two aims. First, it offers reflections on the possibilities and limitations of using user-generated short videos (vlogs) as research data both methodologically and ethically. We specifically explore the potential of centering vlogs as a new format for examining motherhood behavior across online and offline spaces. Secondly, it adds to the thematic literature on the (re)production and representations of motherhood. We critically examine the rising phenomenon in China of the stay-at-home mother, by exploring how these mothers use short video platforms. Inductively learning from the thematic analysis of short videos of stay-at-home mothers published on Douyin, the patterns in the data indicate three distinct forms of labor are performed through digital motherhood practices: domestic labor, affective labor, and entrepreneurial labor. Drawing on these patterns, we update the original framework of “motherhood 2.0,” which was coined in the 2010s to address mothering practices in industrialized western societies. We extend this framework and conceptualize “motherhood 3.0” by analyzing a type of Chinese community-based intersectional performance of motherhood, gender, and labor that we see emerging in digital cultural production centered on short videos. Mediated labor within online and offline motherhood practices is informed by social, cultural, and technological factors. Digital technologies and mobile media communication provide new means for stay-at-home mothers to navigate between their roles as devoted mothers and their pursuit of self-actualization.

This commentary proposes a reorientation of diaspora studies towards new configurations of participation and identification. Digital media affordances in this sense are just such new configurations that enable, sustain and multiply diasporic encounters through social media platforms, digital devices and infrastructures. The emerging digital diasporas do not oppose or replace traditional diasporas, but on the contrary further expand and transform their agency in the digital age Mihaela Nedelcu (2018). In our thinking, we are inconversation with, as well as departing from, previous notions of diaspora. In this commentary, we briefly establish the complex and non-linear genealogy of the term, as partaking in multiple disciplinary takes and discursive orientations, and then migrating to the new realm of technology and digital connectedness.

While infrastructures of media and of migration currently converge in specific ways, in this commentary, we consider how these infrastructures always reflect distinctive moments in media history, as well as in migration history. An archaeological approach to infrastructure posits that media infrastructures do not spring into action fully formed, and neither is there ever a moment when they would be fully formed. We propose the perspective of deep time of infrastructures as a way of opening up unresolved questions about what critical researchers can and should do with historically-informed inquiry of media technologies across migration contexts. We specifically operationalize the deep time of media and migration infrastructures by addressing the three dimensions of: (1) materialities; (2) practices; and (3) imaginaries.