Diverse Voices, Data Justice, and Sustainability
An IAMCR pre-conference
Description
This preconference builds on discussions over the past two years under the aegis of the InterAsian
Digitalities initiative at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at Northwestern
University in Qatar, part of the Arab Council for Social Sciences’ InterAsia Partnership. These include
a conference on Southern Digitalities in March 2023 in Doha, Qatar, a two-day workshop in Beirut,
Lebanon in May 2024, and a panel on “Southern Digitalities: Contestations, Labor, and Belonging
across InterAsia” at ICA 2024.
We are inspired by this year’s IAMCR theme and invitation to foreground notions of sustainability,
justice, and role of digital technologies in promoting and/ or challenging existing and emergent forms
of social inequalities. Participants will include diverse scholars, at various career stages, from multiple
disciplines and institutions, many in the Global South, who are conducting empirical research across
‘InterAsia,’ including West, East, South East, South West, or Central Asia, as well as offering
research that reframes, contests, and reimagines the salience of these frames. The preconference will
include carefully curated panels related to digital citizenship, data and environmental justice, national
identification, belonging, access, and contested sovereignties in the context of current crises and
increasing social, racial, gendered, national, ethnic inequalities.
Location
TBA
Date and time
Saturday 12 July, 2025
From 8h00 until 17h00
Participation and registration
TBA
Convenor
The Institute for Advanced Study in the Global South at Northwestern University in Qatar
(#IAS_NUQ) produces and promotes evidence-based storytelling focused on the histories, cultures,
societies, and media of the Global South. Our inclusive vision of globality recognizes the diversities
and inequalities that shape the societies we inhabit and study. We harness traditions from the liberal
arts, media, communication, and journalism to forge multi-disciplinary and multi-modal approaches to
knowledge that is locally relevant and globally resonant. This synthesis of deep expertise,
interdisciplinary inquiry, and creative mediamaking stimulates critical conversations about enduring
questions and emerging challenges that confront the Global South and its enmeshments in global
structures and flows of people, goods, words, images, and ideas. Our core commitments are to amplify
NU-Q faculty and student scholarship and mediamaking, to boost undergraduate research, mentor our
students who plan to pursue advanced graduate degrees, and forge pathways to the professoriate
locally and globally. To these ends, #IAS_NUQ hosts fellows (student, postdoctoral, faculty) who
work on individual projects and collaborate in local and global research groups, produce multi-lingual
and multi-modal #IAS_NUQ_Press publications and creative media, and organizes lectures,
screenings, workshops, and conferences.
Organisers
- Clovis Bergère (Northwestern University in Qatar)
- Marwan M. Kraidy (Northwestern University in Qatar)
- Marina R. Krikorian (Northwestern University in Qatar)
