Prelims

Half Title Page

Digital Politics, Digital Histories, Digital Futures

Endorsements

This book offers a much needed holistic and interdisciplinary perspective on digital politics. Adi Kuntsman and Liu Xin stage an engaging conversation between leading and emerging scholars, who examine the history, political economy, and materiality of digital politics. Crucially, they do so from different geo-political, disciplinary, and conceptual angles, which generates vital new insights. And, as icing on the cake, the book offers two experimental research toolkits to explore the histories and social-technical imaginaries of digital politics. In sum, Digital Politics, Digital Histories, Digital Futures is a creative and thought-provoking contribution.

Thomas Poell, Professor of Data, Culture & Institutions, University of Amsterdam

Combining theoretical reflections and empirical diversity, this collection gathers interdisciplinary conversations about how the digital and the political are reconfiguring one another with implications for social movements, global warfare, infrastructural governance, citizen rights, and the future of archives.

Entangling the socio-cultural and the environmental with the digital, leading scholars and dynamic researchers open up the field of digital politics to the political economy of disinformation, critiques of development discourses and digital divides, and materialities of dirty data. The volume presents insights curated inexperimental multi-dimensional and multi-authored forms – interviews, maps, toolkits, and essays – which will inspire researchers and teachers of social media and digital technologies, and set a new benchmark for future collaborative knowledge production.

This volume not only offers a powerful argument for historicizing digital research but also provides innovative methodologies and alternative imaginaries to understand digital histories and futures.

Rahul Mukherjee, Associate Professor of Television and New Media, University of Pennsylvania and author of Radiant Infrastructures

Series Title Page

Digital Activism and Society: Politics, Economy and Culture in Network Communication

The Digital Activism and Society: Politics, Economy and Culture in Network Communication series focuses on the political use of digital everyday-networked media by corporations, governments, international organizations (Digital Politics), as well as civil society actors, NGOs, activists, social movements and dissidents (Digital Activism) attempting to recruit, organise and fund their operations, through information communication technologies.

The series publishes books on theories and empirical case studies of digital politics and activism in the specific context of communication networks. Topics covered by the series include, but are not limited to:

• the different theoretical and analytical approaches of political communication in digital networks;

• studies of socio-political media movements and activism (and ‘hacktivism’);

• transformations of older topics such as inequality, gender, class, power, identity and group belonging;

• strengths and vulnerabilities of social networks.

Title Page

Digital Politics, Digital Histories, Digital Futures

New Approaches for Historicising, Politicising and Imagining the Digital

Edited by

Adi Kuntsman

Manchester Metropolitan University, UK

And

Liu Xin

Karlstad University, Sweden

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

Copyright Page

Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2023

Editorial matter and selection © 2023 Adi Kuntsman and Liu Xin.

Individual chapters © 2023 The authors.

Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-80382-202-0 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-80382-201-3 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-80382-203-7 (Epub)

List of Contributors